Your children will experience species changing events the likes of which this planet has never seen before. They could live to be more than a thousand years old, see the end of material want, begin to colonize space, and perhaps even evolve past human into an entirely new life-form. Yes, your children.
Quite a statement. Can't be - but it is. It's true. But as fantastic as these things sound they carry with them significant risks to our species. For getting from where we are now to there could rip the fabric of our societies, our identities, and our purposes. These changes then represents the greatest existential risks to our species survival every experienced.
After hundreds of thousands of years walking the planet pretty much unchanged, the perfect storm for our species has already begun to form, you can hear it's rumblings and see it gathering on the horizon. The greatest storm of change for the good but also the greatest existential threats humankind has ever had to face is forming and will strike, full force, sometime in the next 50 -100 years.
The storm will consist of a conglomerate of massive change to our selves, our societies, and our species. It will hit us with a speed and intensity we cannot possibly withstand, unless we begin to prepare now. If properly prepared for it the storm could be harnessed to usher in a new age of prosperity, fairness. longevity, and a durable peace. But if not properly managed it promises to destroy us all.
The storm will consist of four major elements:
1 Climate change - Successfully navigating this threat will see the end of nationalism and more acceptance of worldview. We will begin to accept the fact that we all live on a small, fragile planet, immersed in unbelievably hostile vacuum, surrounded by an immensity we cannot comprehend and by forces that could vaporize our plant in a heartbeat. We will come to understand all we have is this planet and its life - all of its life - and that will foster empathy and tolerance, for all of life, everywhere.
It will, by necessity, see the end of the modern day corporations with their singular objective - profit - to be replaced by something more humane and socially responsible. It will see the end of carbon based energy and product. It will see the full embracement of sustainability and balance with the natural world - or we will die. Tell that to the oil companies, our current forms of governance, and even the people of the world - and good luck.
2 Genetic manipulation
a. The end of aging The slowing and/or reversal of aging. Scientists have already accomplished this in mice - making old mice, young again. A report published in January, 2023 describes the ability to reverse and/or accelerate aging in mice.
These mice are from the same litter. The one at right has been genetically altered to be old.
(CNN) — In Boston labs, old, blind mice have regained their eyesight, developed smarter, younger brains and built healthier muscle and kidney tissue. On the flip side, young mice have prematurely aged, with devastating results to nearly every tissue in their bodies.
The experiments show aging is a reversible process, capable of being driven “forwards and backwards at will,” said anti-aging expert David Sinclair, a professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research.
b. The regeneration of organs, limbs, nerves.
c. The curing of all disease at the cellular level.
All of this in your child's lifetime. Life expectancy then exceeding a thousand years based solely on a person's odds of suffering a life-ending trauma. A complete social reorganization changing the way we look at age, career, family, purposes. People will be able to choose their biologic age perhaps using it in part to signal current lifestyle and interests. It will force solutions to over population, massive changes in our healthcare delivery, in our worldview, and society in general. If these changes do not occur we will witness an overcrowded hell on earth and witness a maelstrom of war and conflict that could easily end us.
3 Autonomous automation of the production of all material goods and energy.
Full autonomous automation is the logical conclusion to our modern day automation trend powered by profit and greed. Automation is cheaper and more efficient and so there will be no stopping it. It will progress nearly exponentially until it begins to impact on economies as it replaces more and more jobs.
In the next 5-10 years 4 million drivers, just in the USA, will lose their jobs to autonomous vehicles. That is 3% of the total USA workforce. And where it is true that the automation industry may create jobs for some of these drivers, eventually even those jobs will be lost to automation. Shortly thereafter advances in artificial intelligence will spell the demise of many of the jobs in the service industry, in manufacturing, product distribution, and on and on. This will extend even into the professions - doctors, lawyers, and engineers - Oh my who are we to marry now?
But people have worried about the impact of automation on jobs and the economy for hundreds of years. Just look at the rust belt here in the Midwest United States to witness first hand the harm automation can cause, but also the resilience of our workforce. Despite great worry and dire predictions ever since the invention of the printing press, automation has created nearly as many jobs as it has displaced, to include the rust belt. But we are not talking about typesetters, or automated looms, or even industrial robots bolted to assembly lines. This sort of automation has nearly always created as many jobs as it has replaced. But full autonomous automation will not.
Full autonomous automation will be directed by artificial intelligence (AI) and will thus work its way into nearly every job and profession there is. It's growth will be nearly exponential - we are just starting to see the steepening of the curve to dizzying rates, as it begins to spread at an ever increasing pace into the entire work place - something we have never seen before. Eventually AI directed machines will self-improve, and self-repair, while harvesting their own energy and raw materials, refining and processing them, then assembling and distributing every material need people require for high quality life - without the need for a single human intervention. Fully autonomous automation.
There is great promise in this. Every material need provided without the need for human intervention could be provided for free. Free? No one is doing anything to produce everything needed to live high quality lives and so why not free?
We would have the means to completely end poverty, worldwide, and along with it, hunger, malnutrition, and their associated diseases. All without lowering anyone's standard of living. We would have the means to end wealth inequality - and in doing so can end the disparities in health care, education, and opportunity, associated with it. We will have the ability for all people to live in the manner and at the standard of living of their choice, everywhere - wanting for nothing material. We will have the means to equip scientific, exploration, engineering, and artistic endeavor with all that is needed, without regard to cost. We will have the means to replace the focus in government from wealth and power, to actually governing and power. We will have the means for people to focus on the attainment of knowledge and skill in science, music, the arts, and societal interaction - full time - rather than focusing on survival, materialism, wealth, and consumerism. There would be a cultural shift away from materialism and mere survival to self-fulfillment, exploration, discovery, and artistic expression.
Self perpetuating, self run machines, producing everything in subterranean facilities, nonpolluting and out of sight? Utopian fantasy?
Clearly fully autonomous automation has utopian qualities to it. But let there be no doubt - it is coming.
But getting from here to there involves the progressive displacement of the human workforce, and an evolutionary shift in people's thinking away from money, materialism, wealth, and basic survival. Fully autonomous automation is not the problem. It is the getting from here to there without destroying ourselves in the process that is the real trick. And it will be quite the trick.
I find it ironic that as automation moves forward from where it is today to approaching full autonomous automation, it will first destroy the corporations implementing it, along with the world's economies. If everyone is out of a job - who is going to buy the products and services? And what becomes of our economy as more and more people are displaced into unemployment at an ever faster rate?
The answer is simple. We will destroy our way of life unless we plan for it now. We don't just wait for it - we embrace it, now, as a common goal worldwide. Make it the entire world’s ‘land a man on the moon in a decade’ unified effort - to end hunger, poverty, most communicable diseases while enhancing education, knowledge, and self-expression. Millions of people and their governments, along with trillions of dollars worldwide, are then committed to developing full autonomous automation over the next 30 years in a manner that does not destroy us along the way. A herculean effort many will say can't be done, exactly as they said of landing a person on the moon in the 1960's.
We would create an international automation administration - IAA - to bring worldwide resources and expertise together with the common mission of attaining complete autonomous automation and freedom from material constraint for all mankind, within the next 30 years. Expediting automation while transitioning as painlessly away from materialism as possible, it's mission.
Ten years from now 4 million drivers in the USA, 33 million worldwide will be out of work. The IAA will then subsidize their training and salaries for jobs in the automation industry, paying them at least what they were earning as drivers. When the next great wave of automation strikes - say the global distribution of material goods – planes, ships, trains – those people will also be trained and hired into the automation industry. This would serve to maintain world economies while accelerating the effort to full automation.
There then comes a point where further advancements in automation are put in place but are deliberately kept offline as more and more people are retrained and hired into the automation industry until such a day where the entire world’s material needs can be produced autonomously by machines. This is done to protect the health of world economies in the interim. But once ready to come fully online we throw the switch – at once ending poverty, unequal wealth distribution, famine, and all their associated problems - evolving as a species past materialism and working to survive, to working to self-enlighten, to discover, explore, self-express, help others, and working to thrive.
Money, if it even continues exist, will take on a new form based mostly in barter, trading for art and unique antiquities as example. Politics becomes politics minus money, in other words unrecognizable but I suspect just as obnoxious. Human constructs such as prestige, religion, power, status, will remain at their essence, unchanged.
Full autonomous automation while utopian in many respects, will leave the world still recognizable and still flawed, but all so much better off. It will represent the greatest social evolutionary leap since humans moved past small nomadic clans to city states - if only we do it right. If we don't do it right, we may find ourselves back to small nomadic tribes or completely destroyed.
4. Super general artificial intelligence - evolving beyond human just to keep up.
We are going to develop an artificial intelligence millions, perhaps billions, of times smarter than our current capabilities in the next 100 years. It is the inevitable result of computer technology.
Lots of fear over what this intelligence will do with us.
As a starting point, perhaps we should stop calling it artificial. Probably not a good idea to piss it off right out of the starting gate. More importantly there will be nothing artificial about it. Humans are not a special case, us versus nature is an illusion of sentience only. And so, in coming from us it is as real as anything else in this universe.
But here's the real argument against it being artificial. If we want what is fundamentally human to survive, then this intelligence will need to be us. It will be us and we this intelligence. It is our only viable evolutionary pathway.
Doubling the knowledge base of all humanity took 150 years between 1750 and 1900. It took 50 years between 1900 and 1950. 10 years to double from 1950-1960. By 2023 our knowledge base will double every 54 days - with no end to this exponential growth in sight. How are we to ever keep up?
The simple fact is we won't, unless we alter our brains. The information 'explosion' will far outpace growth in our population and in our ability to use it cohesively as a species. Even if individuals specialize to the point of absurdity - competition, and limits of cooperation and bandwidth, will demand brain enhancement. The alterations and enhancements will continue at ever greater speed with the increasing deluge of information until finally we become unrecognizable to our ancestors - until we are in fact, no longer, human.
Be it planned or simply the desire to keep up, the development of 'artificial' super general intelligence is really, at the end of the day, going to involve self-directed evolution of humans beyond human.
Given humankind's ability for self-harm we had better get a move on figuring out how best to accomplish this, if we are to have any hope of surviving the process.
