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Weekend Reading: What Lies Ahead Edition

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Audi from I, Robot. Source: http://imcdb.org/vehicle_1833-Audi-RSQ.htmlBefore you read on: My iPad giveaway is still open! Don’t miss your chance to enter and win!

I am always astonished at how technology has made our lives so much easier in such a short period of time. My grandmother grew up in a time where there were no televisions, no commercial air travel, no washing machines, and life as a child meant lots of manual labour and taking care of your younger siblings, and long bike-rides to school! When her grandmother was growing up, there were no radios or cars, and much of the American west was still wild and free.

I don’t think we appreciate enough just how much the world has changed in just a few generations and how this change is accelerating; when else in history have things changed this quickly? If you were living in Roman times, your great-great grandparent’s lives were probably not much different than your own. If living in prehistoric times, there was probably no discernible difference at all. Now, change is measured in years and months.

What’s next? All of these technological solutions come with their own set of problems. Within a couple of decades, most cars will be automated and electric, and cost less than gas-powered vehicles. How will we deal with the huge increase in traffic that will come about? Automated driving can help, but to a certain extent. How will we deal with the existential risks posed by bio-engineering and nano-technology?

What I think is the biggest issue to come: How will we humans deal with a world driven and powered by machine intelligence? As a software developer, I fully expect that most humans will be unemployed by 30 to 40 years out, and that while my profession will be one of the first to get hit, no profession will be immune, whether it be white collar or blue collar.

  • Do you drive as a living? Robots will replace your job with their unwavering attention and accident-free driving.
  • Do you work in construction? Robots will be able to get the job done more quickly, and without losses from workers’ compensation or unions.
  • No profession will be left out. Haven’t you seen what Jude Law was up to in the movie A.I.? 😉 As weird and far-fetched as this seems right now, every culture has done things that seem quite bizarre to other cultures, and I do think that this will become a reality for many people. Why not? Robot partners will never nag, complain, or be selfish.

How will we humans survive? How do we ensure that AI doesn’t kill us all? While people are focused on nuclear weapons and terrorism, I actually think that it’s artificial intelligence that poses both the prime existential risk and the salvation for our species. If you’re working on AI (to a certain person that might be reading this post, yes, I’m directing this at you!), you could either be complicit in the death of billions, or responsible for the one thing that can solve all of our world’s problems. Are you taking your work seriously?

Let’s say that AI has taken over most professions. What then? How do we survive?

  • World output will be huge. Humans need never work again, but…
  • How will this output be distributed? If it’s based on property rights, what happens to people who have no property? If it’s based on socialism, what happens to those who fall out of favour with the central dictatorship? And…
  • AI will out-think us in every possible way. All rights and morality are pleasant fictions that derive both from our evolved behaviour and our reason; they help us to coordinate and avoid descending into a hellish nightmare of all against all. When power disparities are great enough, all that matters is what the universe allows. The universe allows us to destroy the habitats of monkeys and violate their “rights”. Why would a vastly superior intelligence have any interest in respecting our rights, when there’s not much we could do to actually defend them? We would be like monkeys or ants to them.

I understand the appeal in living for the moment, enjoying a nice ski run, a vacation on the beach, and I do love all of that stuff. 🙂 However, our future and the future of our unborn children includes a world where this stuff is going to become a reality, so I do spend a lot of time thinking about this. Will we make it through? What will the world be like on the other side? Will it be a utopia on Earth, or are all the sci-fi writers right about their pessimism?

Special mentions

A special thanks to Rob Carrick for featuring IIW in his personal finance reader!

Recent posts you might have missed at IIW

Weekend Reading

Business
  • Claiming a Business Loss – Losing Money Never Felt So Good
Career
Economy
Giveaways
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Investing
Miscellaneous
Motivation
Personal Finance
Politics
Technology

Have a good weekend, all!

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Comments

  2. Thanks for the mention Kevin! Always a pleasure to read your lists and find articles like ‘I’m Hot Because I’m Bald’. That one deserved a clickthrough 😉

  4. I like this post, Kevin, only because I have of those ponderings myself. Robot courtesans are an intriguing possibility.
    Labor in agriculture has been hit severely over the last half-century, with intense mechanization and monoculture displacing the small family farm. I believe thought that the pendulum will swing (is swinging) the other way, as water and soil stocks get drawn down unsustainably and the need for more conserving — and hence labor-intense — measures becomes a necessity.
    Thanks for the mention, by the way.

    • Hi 101,

      Certainly seems to be true of oil-driven mechanization. What do you think if power somehow gets cheap enough, via solar power? Also, the closer you get to the equator the stronger the sun gets, so this has the potential of helping out many areas that have been historically disadvantaged. Maybe I’m too optimistic, but with energy many things are possible. We really do need to do something about that soil erosion and deforestation, though.

  5. AI is both scary and exciting I think.

    So much has changed in our generation already; music tapes, typewriters and computers the size of boardroom desks used to be the norm. Pretty cool to think what we’ll dream up and invent in another 25-30 years.

    Thanks for including my article! Hope you had a great weekend!

    Mark

    • Very true, Mark! I remember back in the day when the NES was popular. Man, if only I had kept some of those old cartridges around! 😉

  6. I was just talking to someone the other day about automated cars and how people will no longer need to drive. I don’t know if this is safer or not?! There are some pretty bad drivers out there.

    Your right though – us humans need to find a way to not become obsolete.

    Thanks so much for the inclusion this week. I really appreciate it.

    • I used to be against the idea, cause I couldn’t imagine not being in control of my own car, but I think it’s inevitable. The biggest roadblocks are the legal and political implications. If not for those, we’d have self-driving cars right now, as the technology has been road-tested and it works.

  7. At this point I feel that we are merely solving problems that were created or as a result of previous technology. I wonder if we’ll ever reach the point when we have enough technology.

    Thanks for the mention of my Early Retirement Extreme post and for the reminder on the giveaway.

    • Hi John,

      I don’t know. If our civilization ever expands to the point of being able to capture the full output of a star, then we run into the problem of Peak Sun. Then what? What do you move onto then? Seems all of our history has been like that. 😉

    • They will repair themselves, and need little to no maintenance as they will also be self-maintaining. Humans will either become AI themselves, or … I don’t know. It’s all really highly speculative, but it’s also inevitable unless we find a way of enforcing a total global ban on AI development.

  9. These are really interesting questions! I’m confused by what you say about software developers being one of the first to get hit. If you believe that the world may be run by technology/robots in the future, wouldn’t software devs be a booming field?

    • It’s a bit ironic isn’t it? My thoughts are that once you have the first AI that is smarter than a human, that AI can write its own software, and continue to self-improve and grow ever smarter. Software engineers will be greatly needed up until that moment, but once the genie’s out of the bottle it’s game over. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — it all depends on what kind of AI we give birth to.

  10. Thanks for the mention this week! I hate thinking about future robots and AI. It’s only a matter of time before they get angry with us and kill us all off. Didn’t anybody watch the Terminator or the Matrix movies? There’s all the proof you need 🙂

    • Haha, true, except in the real world, humans won’t have a fighting chance. If they’re smarter than us, then they’re not going to fall victim to a simple mistake. 😉

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