Saturday, March 17th., 2018
Trump sounding the trumpets...Putin holding the horses...We succesfully engaging... in Singularity!
As
long as Trump keeps sounding the trumpets and the bucinas, de-Swamping
the Globe while reviving the brainwashed 'mocking birds' and Putin keeps
holding his horses, while taming the warmongering, bolting,
rampaging Global Swampers' horses, We can keep up our hopes and plans for Humanity's positive, harmonious, peaceful galactic evolution, within the shortly arriving Singularity...
"...That means at a certain point we have to decide what we want to be in this world. We have to manage that change.And, at the heart of this change, will be the question of ethics and humanity. Do we have an ethical imperative to harness the power of exponential technological change for the collective good of mankind? ..."
Maria L. Pelekanaki
Technology vs. Humanity
Today, we can observe that technology is not yet smart enough to do most of the things that come easily to humans (such as deep language understanding). But, over the next few years, we are going to see technology bring exponential change to every part of our lives as it improves exponentially.
There is no end to the possibilities – we will likely see, for example, the end of oil because of the solar energy revolution, the rise of digital money as well as omnipresent intelligent assistants.
Even the singularity – that point in time when technology literally becomes infinitely more powerful than humans – is only seven to 10 years away according to some of my futurist colleagues. I expect I will live to see the singularity.That means at a certain point we have to decide what we want to be in this world. We have to manage that change.
And, at the heart of this change, will be the question of ethics and humanity. Do we have an ethical imperative to harness the power of exponential technological change for the collective good of mankind? Who will decide what’s okay? At the moment it looks like it is Silicon Valley and, to some extent China. Russian president Vladimir Putin has said that whoever invents or rules AI, will rule the world. Does that sound familiar?
Breaking the routine
Technology isn’t inherently good or bad. It’s a tool, without an ethics system of its own – machines do not care if they are a problem for us. So, what does it mean for us? If we use really powerful technology, it means we need to know the difference between what we can do, what we have the right to do, and what is the right thing to do. I believe that we all have at least similar basic human ethics, no matter where we live.The same level of disruption that hit the music industry over the past two decades is hitting all manner of industries – media, banking, insurance and food for instance. Disruption is great but going forward what we really need is construction, because we will need to build something new together.
I think in this new world we are looking at a kind of convergence of man and machine. Our future team members could well be machines in the sense of smart, intelligent agents, and of course, robots. The question with technology is no longer how, but why? In a world of endless connectivity and limitless computing, we need to ask why we are doing whatever it is we are doing, before it is too late.
The biggest threat to our current social system – automation – is also a source of great opportunity. Every job that involves an element of routine will be automated, including mine.
So we’re now headed towards hyper-connectivity, where everything is connected with everything else. In just a few years, online and offline will be the same place.
Data is the new oil, and artificial intelligence (AI) is the new electricity.Data companies are already the most powerful companies in the world and they are getting involved in all industries. For companies facing this future, the question is whether you have can pivot your business model to take advantage of these new technologies.
Heaven or Hell?
Clearly the most disruptive thing in our society today is that intelligent machines will handle a lot of routine tasks. For our kids, that will mean focusing on becoming more human rather than learning skills that a machine will soon be able to do faster and more accurately over time, such as fact-checking or analysing numbers.The future is likely to be part heaven and part hell. For example, it’s heaven for people who use Spotify (21 Million songs for £10), but it might be hell for artists that used to sell CDs for £20. To solve this sort of problem we have to figure out how we address these new imbalances, but also what exactly makes us human. Some of my colleagues say that humans are essentially fancy machines – they believe in technology, literally. I don’t agree. Rather, I think machines will mostly replace our tasks, not our jobs. They may replace someone at the supermarket checkout but they don’t threaten human work, in general. Everything that is not able to be digitised becomes a human role. Thus, we should focus on the skills that are inherently human – critical thinking, creativity, emotional intelligence and cognitive flexibility. Non-routine, cognitive work is the future.
The biggest risk to our future is not that technology will take over but that we will become too much like technology. Let’s think about where it’s going. Let’s balance the EQ with the IQ. A computer will never actually be happy, or excited, at least not for the foreseeable future. We should think of technology not as what we seek but rather how we seek – it is a tool we should embrace, not one we should become.