By 2030, We Homo-Sapiens Will Become: Techno-Homo-Sapiens
Over the next decade Ai will create human transformation that far outpaces The Hunter Gatherer Era, The Cognitive Revolution, The Agricultural Revolution, and The Industrial Revolution.
Ai will enable an Ai-Scientific Revolution based on intelligent design, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, biotech, and brain-computer interfaces that could produce superhuman capabilities that we now do not have. We are on the leading edge scientifically of changing our brains! Yes, nanotechnology! Yes, connect computers to our brains!
From a business – work perspective, AI will transform and consolidate businesses, industries, and workplaces. AI will continuously take over jobs that are now done by humans.AI will transform how we live, how we think, how we work, and whether we will have work.
An AI race is on! It is being led by governments, scientists and technology companies.
How will we humans have a role in making sure the harms of Ai are minimized?
Who will be responsible for overseeing the use of Ai?
Who will represent the public - especially the middle and lower class of the United States and the World -making sure that they will not be harmed?
No human being should be left behind! Survival of the Fittest should not be our approach. We will need a social safety net for people whose jobs are automated. UBI is not out of the question.
This is serious! To help you understand the seriousness, I want to share with some thought-provoking realities written by two leading edge technology leaders who are deeply concerned about making sure the use of AI will not be harmful:
Ray Kurzweil - Author of “The SINGULARITY is NEARER: When we merge with AI”; and
Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar - Author of “THE COMING WAVE: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma”.
If you like, this post can be read in two parts. Feel free to read Part 1, and then take a break letting it all sink in. Then whenever you are ready, please read Part 2 and let it sink in. Of course, you may read the entire post in one time. (I have taken the liberty of bolding some of their writings.) *******************************
Part 1: Ray Kurzweil: “The SINGULARITY is NEARER: When we merge with AI”.
p.4: “During the coming decade, people will interact with AI that can seem convincingly human, and simple brain-computer interfaces will impact daily life much like smartphones do today. A digital revolution in biotech will cure diseases and meaningfully extend people’s healthy lives. At the same time, though, many workers will feel the sting of economic disruption, and all of us will face risks from accidental or deliberate misuse of these new capabilities.”
“During the 2030s, self-improving AI and maturing nanotechnology will unite humans and our machine creations as never before – heightening both the promise and the peril even further. If we can meet the scientific, ethical, social, and political challenges posed by these advances, by 2045 we will transform life on earth profoundly for the better. Yet if we fail, our very survival is in question.”
p.5: “One of the most obvious downsides of innovation, though, is unemployment caused by automation in its various forms.”
THE FUTURE OF JOBS: GOOD OR BAD?
p.197: “A landmark 2013 study by Oxford University Scholars Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne ranked about seven hundred occupations on their likelihood of being disrupted by the early 2030s. At a 99 percent likelihood of being able to be automated were such job categories as telemarketers, insurance underwriters, and tax preparers. More than half of all occupations had a greater than 50 percent likelihood of being automatable.”
p.198: “A 2018 study by the Organisation for Economic-operation and Development reviewed how likely it was for each task in a given job to be automated and obtained results similar to Frey and Osborne’s.”
“The latest estimates, such as a 2023 report by McKinsey, found that 63 percent of all working time in today’s developed economies is spent on tasks that could already be automated with today’s technology. If adoption proceeds quickly, half of the work could be automated by 2030….”
“But we know AI is going to continue to progress - exponentially - until we have super-human level AI and fully automated, atomically precise manufacturing (controlled by AI) sometime in the 2030s.”
p.222: “But we are already well into the next phase of our own betterment, which is enhancing our capabilities by merging with the intelligent technology we are creating. We are not yet putting computerized devices inside our bodies and brains, but they are literally close at hand.”
EDH: We will have augmented reality, AI assistants, and in the 2030’s medical nanorobots that will begin to integrate brain extensions in our nervous system. We will extend our neocortex into the cloud. Kurzweil in 2018 predicted that we would have universal basic income (UBI) or its equivalent by the early 2030s. That would mean regular payments or providing free goods and services. Prosperity must be shared with all.
p.228: “If we can get these political challenges right, human life will be utterly transformed. Historically we’ve had to compete to meet the physical needs of life. But as we enter an era of abundance, and the availability of material necessities eventually becomes universal – while many traditional jobs go away – our main struggle will be for purpose and meaning.”
p.229: “In a personal dialogue I had with Daniel Kahneman, … He also agreed that we are headed toward an era of abundance that will meet our physical needs and that the primary struggle will be to satisfy higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. However, he envisioned a protracted period of conflict, and even violence, between now and then. He pointed out there will invariably be winners and losers as automation continues its impact.”
p.231: “But the social safety net doesn’t replace the sense of purpose jobs give, and as Kahneman argued, there are going to be many losers in the labor market. …… Kahneman believes that people need time to adapt to change and to take advantage of new opportunities, and many will be unable to rapidly retrain for new types of employment or alternative personal business models.”
p.233: “All of that being said, I do think the specter of troublesome social dislocation – including violence – during this transition is a possibility that we should anticipate and work to mitigate. “
PROMISE AND PERIL:
p.267: “So far this book has explored the many ways that the final years until the Singularity will bring rapidly increasing human prosperity. But just as this progress will improve billions of lives, it will also heighten peril for our species. New, destabilizing nuclear weapons, breakthroughs in synthetic biology, and emerging nanotechnologies will all introduce threats that we must deal with. And as AI itself reaches and surpasses human capabilities, it will need to be carefully aligned with beneficial purposes and specifically designed to avert accidents and thwart misuse.”
p.278: “But superintelligent AI entails a fundamentally different kind of peril – in fact, the primary peril. If AI is smarter than its human creators, it could potentially find a way around any precautionary measures that have been put in place. There is no general strategy that can definitely overcome that.”
“There are three broad categories of peril from superintelligent AI, and with focused research on each, we can at least mitigate the risk. Misuse encompasses cases where AI functions as its human operators intend, but those operators deploy it to deliberately cause harm to others.” …… Next is outer misalignment, which refers to cases where there’s a mismatch between the programmer’s actual intentions and the goals they teach the AI in hopes of achieving them. …… Finally, inner misalignment occurs when the methods the AI learns to achieve its goal produce undesirable behavior, at least in some cases.”
p.282: “Further, what will “human” even ultimately mean in the context of human control when we introduce a nonbiological addition to our own decision-making starting in the 2030s using brain-computer interfaces?
That nonbiological component will only grow exponentially, while our biological intelligence will stay the same. So as we get to the late 2030s, our thinking will be largely nonbiological. So where will the human decision-making be when our thought largely uses non-biological systems?
p.285: “AI is the pivotal technology that will allow us to meet the pressing challenges that confront us, including overcoming disease, poverty, environmental degradation, and all our human frailties. We have a moral imperative to realize this promise of new technologies while mitigating the peril.”
***********************************************
Part 2: Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar - Author of “THE COMING WAVE: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma”.
p.3 Prologue – “THIS IS HOW AN AI SEES IT” (written by AI)
Recommended by LinkedIn
“Question: What does the coming wave of technology mean for humanity?“In the annals of human history, there are moments that stand out as turning points, where the humanity hangs in balance…………….”
“And now we stand at the brink of another such moment as we face the rise of a coming wave of technology that includes both advanced AI and biotechnology. Never before have we witnessed technologies with such transformative potential, promising to reshape our world in ways that are both awe-inspiring and daunting.”
“On the one hand, the potential benefits of these technologies are vast and profound. With AI, we could unlock the secrets of the universe, cure diseases that have long eluded us…. With biotechnology, we could engineer life to tackle diseases and transform agriculture, creating a world that is healthier and more sustainable.”
“But on the other hand, the potential dangers of these technologies are equally vast and profound. With AI, we could create systems that are beyond our control and find ourselves at the mercy of algorithms that we don’t understand. With biotechnology, we could manipulate the very building blocks of life, potentially creating unintended consequences for both individuals and entire ecosystems.”
“As we stand at this turning point, we are faced with a choice – a choice between a future of unparalleled possibility and a future if unimaginable peril. The fate of humanity hangs in the balance, and the decisions we will make in the coming years and decades will determine whether we rise to the challenge of these technologies or fall victim to their dangers.”
Now the Author’s words.
“CONTAINMENT IS NOT POSSIBLE”
p.7 “The coming wave is defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology. Together they will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen. And yet their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability, and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale. This wave creates an immense challenge that will define the twenty-first century: our future both depends on these technologies and is imperiled by them.”
p.9 “AI has been climbing the later of cognitive abilities for decades, and now it looks set to reach human-level performance across a very wide range of tasks within the next three years.” ………… “Beyond AI, a wider revolution was underway, with AI feeding a powerful emerging generation of genetic technologies and robotics.”
p.11 “This is the core dilemma: that, sooner or later, a powerful generation of technology leads humanity toward either catastrophic or dystopian outcomes. I believe this is the great meta-problem of the twenty-first century.”
p.16 “We urgently need watertight answers for how the coming wave can be controlled and contained, how the safeguards and affordances of the democratic nation-state can be maintained, but right now no one has such a plan.”
p.19 “The coming wave of technologies threatens to fail faster and on a wider scale than anything witnessed before. This situation needs worldwide, popular attention. It needs answers, answers that no one yet has.
“Containment is not, on the face of it, possible. And yet for all our sake, containment must be possible.”
p.56 “While AI and synthetic biology are the coming wave’s central general-purpose technologies, a bundle of technologies with unusually powerful ramifications surrounds them, encompassing quantum computing, robotics, nanotechnology, and the potential for abundant energy, among others.”
p.65 “Over the next few years, I believe, AI will become as ubiquitous as the internet itself. Just as available, and yet even more consequential.”
p.78 “The future of AI is, at least in one sense, fairly easy to predict. Over the next five years, vast resources will continue to be invested. Some of the smartest people on the planet are working on these problems……. All of this will lead to more dramatic leaps forward, including breakthroughs toward AI that can imagine, reason, plan, and exhibit common sense. It won’t be long before AI can transfer what it “knows” from one domain to another, seamlessly, as humans do.”
p.81 “Genome sequencing is now a booming business……. But the power of biotech goes far beyond our ability to simply read the code; it now enables us to edit it, and write it, too. CRISPR gene editing …. is perhaps the best-known example of how we can directly intervene in genetics….”
p.83 “This capability has given rise to the new field of synthetic biology – the ability to read, edit, and now write the code of life.”
p.115 “However, any discussion of containment has to acknowledge that if or when AGI-like technologies do emerge, they will present containment problems beyond anything else we’ve ever encountered. Humans dominate our environment because of our intelligence. A more intelligent entity could, it follows, dominate us.” …… “By creating something smarter than us, we could put ourselves in the position of our primate cousins.”
p.121 “Today, China has an explicit national strategy to be the world leader in AI by 2030.” ……. “It’s not just AI either. From cleantech to bioscience, China surges across the spectrum of fundamental technologies, investing at an epic scale… “
p.123 “China is already ahead of the United States in green energy, 5G, and AI and is on a trajectory to overtake it in quantum and biotech in the next few years.”
p.125 “Great power competition with China is one of the few areas enjoying bipartisan agreement in Washington. The debate now isn’t whether we are in a technological and AI arms race; it’s where it will lead.” …………………. “Almost every country now has a detailed AI strategy. Vladimir Putin believes the leader in AI “will become the ruler of the world.”
p.155 “Every previous wave of technology has had profound political implications. We should expect the same in the future.” …………….. “It’s hardly news that social media platforms can trigger gut emotional responses, the jolts of adrenaline so effectively delivered by perceived threats. Social media thrives on heightened emotions and, quiet often, outrage.
p.157 “Put simply, technology and political order are intimately connected. The introduction of new technologies has major political consequences. Just as the canon and the printing press upended society, so should we expect the same from technologies like AI, robotics, and synthetic biology.”
p.159 “………. (M)anaging the coming wave requires confident, agile, coherent states, accountable to the people, filled with expertise, balancing interests and incentives, capable of reacting fast and decisively with legislative action and, crucially, close international coordination. Leaders will need to take bold actions without precedent, trading off short term gain for long-term benefit. Responding effectively to one of the most far-reaching and transformative events in history will require mature, stable, and most of all trusted governments to perform at their best.”
p.210 “Over the next ten years, AI will be the greatest force amplifier in history. This is why it could enable a redistribution of power on a historic scale. The greatest accelerant of human progress imaginable, it will also enable harms – from wars and accidents to random terror groups, authoritarian governments, overreaching corporations, plain theft, and willful sabotage.”
EDH: In Chapter 14, the author put forth “ten areas of focus” called “TEN STEPS TOWARD CONTAINMENT”.
He states p.237: “I outline ten areas of focus. This is not a complete map, not remotely a set of final answers, but necessary groundwork. My intent is to seed ideas in the hopes of taking the crucial first steps toward containment.
****************************************************************************************
My purpose in sharing these writings is to help you understand the new reality that we are facing and to encourage you to be part of the solution in whatever way you can.
To “Take Ownership of You” and bring your “Best Self” to your world everyday all in the pursuit of human excellence and human positivity. We all must become continuous Highly Adaptive Learners who can learn – unlearn- and relearn at the speed of change. All the while making sure that we are not part of the problem.
Here are two links to two recent United States reports prepared by the White House addressing coming actions:
We live in challenging times. Take care of yourself and your loved ones. Help yourself by embracing Positivity and learn how to take ownership of your ego, mind, and body so you can manage stress.
I wish you all the best,
Ed
Founder & CEO at Mind Your Language
5moEd - did you see that Ray Dalio has one of your books as his Top 20 all-time reads?
Building & integrating COMMUNITY into your BUSINESS MODEL, so you own high-impact business with repeatable revenue system. Scaled organization from 0 to 20,000 paid community members in one year | Former UNICEF
5moWow. Thanks Edward Hess 🧡
While I agree with your conclusions regarding the need to prepare for an AI world, I encourage everyone to be careful of the "Hype Cycle". Kurzweil has been prescient and insightful in encouraging us to think about technological advancement along exponential curves rather than linear ones. But, if you carefully compare his latest book to the 2005 "Singularity is Near" you may see signs of a person seeking to defend his conclusions rather than test his hypotheses. Nanotechnology has not advanced at the pace he predicted 20 years ago and he defends his assumption that there will always be a new "S-Curve" to drive exponential advancement by trying to classify technologies that are not advancing as not information-based. Recall that a decade ago Obama asserted that 3D printing would change the world and the Financial Times proclaimed it would be "bigger than the Internet". It has not proven to be so...but Kurzweil still highlights it as a key enabler of his techno-future. We are arguably "Techno-Homo-Sapiens" already with a host of enhancements that are not embedded in our bodies. More advances are coming, but we should be skeptical of Kurzweil's claim that we can be immortal if we live to 2029.
Producer, Creative Services / Digital Advertising Sales Connecting Brands to Engaged Audiences
5moFascinating topic. I believe it WILL happen.
We sell GREAT tools for engagement and collaboration, globally. Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine game and the Square Wheels images.
5moHey, Edward. Good stuff and I admit to only scanning because I will not retain all the ideas anyway. Have you connected with the Capgemini folks in Italy? You should, for sure!! I just had one other goofy sidebar thought but it is this: "Science, AI and MAGA?" It makes my head spin but maybe the tech will help on the conspiracy side of things to kind of mellow things down to a bit more reality. Ya think? The whole role of science in society has most certainly shifted in the past decade. But I do have hope for the future. More now than a month ago, for sure.