The message below contains a lot of mad science in it. Some of these predictions may be overly optimistic or over-hyped. I will try to get it edited for sanity soon.
But most of the thoughts below are basically factual, with the ethos coming from Wall Street leaders, doctors, scientists, and mainstream media personalities. Some of the information came from BBC News and a lot of it came from Singularity University, an organization supported by places like Google and CNBC.
Anyway, hopefully these rantings will suffice for a few days until I can edit them.
Thanks. :)
The World As I Understand It
- Energy Crisis: The power is running out, and the fuels we are using are killing us.
- Solar
- The energy generated from solar panels is doubling every two years.
- We're only about nine doublings away from complete replacement of fossil fuels through solar.
- Nuclear
- A Canadian company called Terrestrial Energy is only a few years away from producing nuclear reactors which will burn nuclear waste.
- These reactors are safe. No more Fukushimas.
- These reactors burn nuclear waste as fuel. No more 250,000-year waste storage.
- They have a business model so good that they are 100% funded by private investment. No government money is involved in this. They plan to make money off of these things, which means they expect to be commercially viable.
- Information
- Big data gets bigger at a faster rate every day.
- AI is getting smarter at the same rate.
- Robotics is getting cheaper and smarter exponentially as well.
- Finance is an information technology. The ability to bring capital together is improving exponentially.
- Industry is also improving at this rate, from robot-operated assembly lines to the "maker revolution" inspired by 3D printers, Arduinos, and similar technologies.
- Faster and faster, we will solve the problem of how to do everything faster.
- Labour
- Self-driving trucks are now replacing mine workers.
- Self-driving trucks will soon be replacing truck drivers.
- Self-driving cars will soon be replacing taxi and Uber drivers.
- Robots are now replacing factory workers, tens and hundreds of thousands of people at a time. That's happening today, not in the future.
- Digital writers are beginning to replace journalists in some fields.
- Digital assistants will soon be doing administrative work--reducing our need for administrative jobs.
- The faster we replace human labour with robotic labour, the better our industry gets, and so the faster we will be able to build robots to replace us.
- Health
- Exponential improvements in health care will allow us to live longer and longer.
- How long? Some estimates say 120 years.
- What does medical science look like in 50 years? 100 years? How much bigger can that 120 year estimate get by the time a baby born today reaches 120?
- Pattern-recognition engines are now out-performing highly trained medical specialists in some fields. They are rapidly discovering new trends in old data, and the data available to them is rapidly growing.
- The cost of sequencing a human genome is getting cheaper at a rate that is significantly faster than Moore's Law. In a few years, genome-sequencing could be part of routine medical check-ups. Babies could be getting sequenced at birth, and before birth.
- Democracy
- (These are my own thoughts, and are not supported by academics or industry leaders as much as the other categories are.)
- Freedom of information is critical to democracy, and that freedom could be lost without constant vigilance. We must be very careful not to let our information be withheld or corrupted by domineering people and organizations.
- Privacy is equally important--and it is vanishing overnight, without public discussion. Recently, a man lost his basketball team based on racist remarks he made in a private conversation with his girlfriend. Racism is bad, yes, but are we sure we want a world where everything everyone says can be held against them forever, with dire economic and social consequences?
- We will need to find solutions where freedom of information and privacy clash.
- Economy
- In a world of ever-increasing abundance, where human labour is increasingly less necessary for wealth, what work will humans do?
- One promising solution is the idea of a basic wage
- Everyone gets paid a living wage just for being alive.
- Easy to administer--no complex rules about who gets it and who doesn't.
- No stigma, because rich people get paid too.
- Costs less than currently existing social programs.
- Studies show that productivity increases under a basic wage.
- Studies show that new companies are formed at triple the normal rates.
- More studies are needed to verify that these findings are scalable and accurate.
- Spirituality
- (Again, these are just my thoughts.)
- Humanity will (may?) continue to have the advantage in terms of spirituality, morality, and in answering the questions of what we should do and why we should do it.
- It is imperative we guide our AI creations well.
- It's inconvenient when your computer crashes.
- It's disastrous when your AI's morality fails.
- This is not a problem to solve later. It is a problem to solve now.
- Connectivity
- The genius of BitCoin was not in creating digital currency.
- The genius of BitCoin was in creating a distributed system for storing knowledge. There is no "BitCoin server". Every computer that participates adds to the computing pool that maintains BitCoin.
- BitCoin is hugely efficient in handling transactions. Banking fees are likely to drop to almost nothing--not necessarily because BitCoin itself will be adopted, but because its technology will be adopted.
- BitCoin is, in practical terms, impervious to cyber attack, unlike most current security implementations.
- BitCoin is just knowledge. It was designed to store information on finance and transactions, but in theory it could be used to store anything.
- Scientific findings?
- Digital media?
- The algorithms that AIs run on?
- The "distributed ledger", or else an even better connectivity technology, may become the global human memory, the global human consciousness, and the global AI mind.
- (This is one of my own thoughts, but the rest in this category are coming from Wall Street executives and leading computer experts.)
- Space
- With enormous and cheap manufacturing power, we will go to space.
- Moon base will allow us to travel beyond Earth much more cheaply.
- Mars base will allow humans to start living on other worlds.
- Many of us will live long enough to see this happen.
What to Take-Away From This
(Everything after this point is just my own thoughts.)The most important laws we need to make in the next few years will relate to:
- Artificial Intelligence - How much do we let it do? How do we make sure it works for us and not against us?
- Monitoring - How do we ensure that nobody is violating these laws?
- Defence - How do we protect ourselves if somebody escapes the monitoring and creates an illegal AI or robot? Swarms of cheap, autonomous, killer robots are potentially a near-future technology, if not a present one.
- Economy and Finance - How do we deal with a disruption to the very foundation of the labour market, where the ancient arrangement of money for labour is changed forever?
- Freedom of Information - How do we ensure that information remains available for the benefit of all humankind, and doesn't get restrained by selfish parties seeking to gain control?
- Privacy - How do we protect our privacy in a world of exponentially increasing sensors and surveillance?
- World Peace - How do we promote cooperative growth across the whole world? If we don't, a robot and/or AI war is likely to happen. If we do, a whole new future becomes possible for the world, a future where life is safe, peaceful, healthy, fun, and fulfilling.
Things we can do as individuals include:
- Look into how your job is going to get taken over by a robot or AI.
- Start planning your 110th birthday party, because you might get to have it.
- Promote world peace. Seeing your 110th birthday may depend on it.
- Find a way to become involved in this global transformation, whether that's to help it happen or to help it happen peacefully and well.
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