Where is Humanity Going and How Will We Get There?
N.B. Holiday post, off topic and longer than usual. The construction industry does not get a mention, although one assumes there will be a construction industry in the future.
While the idea of researching the future may seem like an oxymoron,
thinking about the implications of current issues and trends in technology, and
applying the limited amount of information we have about potential new
technologies, is not a pointless exercise. While it is true that many, if not
most, of these books date quickly, that is because they focus on relatively
short-term effects or are overly speculative. There have, however, been a
surprising number of notably prescient writers who have tried to think
realistically about technological development over time, Moore’s Law and
Metcalf’s Law for transistors and networks are good examples
As it happens, 2016 saw a number of particularly interesting books on the
future, Although the four reviewed here are very different they share certain
methodological similarities. In each case they use what we already know from
both history and the present in a sensible way, by not relying on some
hypothetical breakthrough like fusion power or conscious machines (as opposed
to machine intelligence). Secondly, they avoid specific predictions and
forecasts, rather presenting their view of what is possible based on what is
understood to be technologically feasible. And third, they do not propose some
fundamental restructuring of human nature or the organisation of society and
the economy, although they are generally aware of the feedback between them and
technological change, and the importance of that link.
The similarities and differences between these four authors are
interesting in their own right. As researchers they seriously address the
topics and issues chosen, and each has singular insights that should be
considered if the far future is of interest to you. The books from Peter Frase,
Kevin Kelly, Robin Hanson and Yuval Noah Harari are discussed below.
*
Peter Frase describes himself
as a lapsed academic sociologist. His
Four
Futures: Life After Capitalism
presents scenarios for the next few decades. This is the most conventional of
these books, in that his scenarios (two good, two bad) are constructed
following a widely accepted approach and reflect his Marxist perspective. He
describes his approach as “social science fiction”, and his futures are interesting
and plausible because they are magnified versions of the present.
Communism - a society that is so productive and egalitarian that nobody
has to work. As a result of unlimited clean energy, robots and automation we
have the material basis for a post-work, post-scarcity and post-carbon world.
In fact, this is the sort of Communism originally expounded by Karl Marx, where
we get “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.
Rentism - abundance exists, but in a wold where a small elite retains
dominance by owning and monopolising the technology used to produce it. This
monopoly is maintained by owning not just the robots, but the data that tells
them how to do their job. In a world where you can automate anything, you can
encode any task as information. In this world the software that robots run on
can be copyrighted as intellectual property, and to use them you have to pay a
fee. That means people need a job, however there aren’t enough jobs because all
the work is done by machines. Therefore, it is only workers required to sustain
the regime that get paid, and most people will be unemployed or under employed.
The economy will be stagnant because it requires consumers but the jobless
masses won’t be able to afford to consume. This scenario also assumes abundant
clean energy.
Socialism - in this third future automation exists but the breakthrough
to carbonless energy doesn’t happen, which means we deal with climate change
through a massive, state-lead campaign to reshape infrastructure and
consumption. Because climate change affects different groups of people
differently, some will do much better than others, particularly those in less
vulnerable geographies or can afford to insulate themselves from the effects of
climate change. Through policies like a universal basic income and market
planning a democratic, egalitarian outcome is produced.
Exterminism - here we have the robots and scarcity of socialism without
the egalitarianism. The result is a neo-feudal dystopia, where the rich retreat
to fortified enclaves and everyone else is left outside in a hot, damp hell of
a rapidly warming planet. Without needing labour, because of automation, the
rich may have no reason to try and save the masses.
One of the strengths of this book is the insistence that creating the
future we want is ultimately as much about politics as technology. In these
four scenarios automation and machine learning are the drivers, what changes is
the political and ecological context. Who owns the robots and how climate
change affects the outcomes will still be issues after the robots arrive. Frase
argues that the future is (can be?) what we make it, and between nihilism and
utopianism lies politics, with its patterns of long, slow struggle punctuated
by an occasional social explosion. A sophisticated argument informed by history
that is intuitively appealing, despite the ideological baggage.
Where the weakness of a class based analysis really shows is in the
missing parts of his scenarios. Although automation and robots feature strongly
in his future, the wider impact of massive amounts of information and huge data
flows does not. It’s a strangely limited view of technology, tailored to suit a
particular argument. The second missing element is the potential of
technologies like genetic engineering, nanotechnology and computer interfaces
to upgrade human abilities.
*
Kevin Kelly was a founder of
Wired magazine in 1992, which documented the
rise of new tech over the next two decades, and before that was editor of the
Whole Earth Review. His 2010 book
What Technology Wants argued tech
evolves in a fitness landscape with a recognisable ecology like biology in a
natural system, and suggested 12 trajectories. In this year’s book
The
Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our
Future he pushes that view to another level, envisioning a world utterly
mediated by data that constantly streams and flows around us while ubiquitous
technology reshapes society.
The chapter titles are verbs and capture his ideas about this future,
which are, in order: becoming, cognifying, flowing, screening, accessing,
sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking, questioning and beginning. The 12
forces interact and reinforce each other. They overlap, so that sharing
encourages flowing and depends on it, cognifying requires screening, screening
is inseparable from interacting, everything is remixed, and so on.
He argues that there are broad historical trends we can observe over the
last few decades that will continue over the next few decades, and that the
dynamics of technology tend to favour certain outcomes. He also believes that
these trends and forces have accelerating momentum, and he wants to “expose
these roots of digital technology because from them will issue the enduring
trends of the next three decades”. He is interested in what he calls aggregate
forces, rather than specifics. The fundamental change will be turning products
into services and processes, so for example cars become transportation
services, regardless of the type of car it is. This is his idea of becoming.
The book does not make predictions, these forces are “trajectories not
destinies”, and he argues that understanding these will lessen the social and
economic displacement they cause while increasing positive outcomes. Many will
disagree, and the sometimes hyperbolic language and techno-optimism can seem
strangely naive in a world beset today with so many issues to deal with.On the other hand, there is a global middle class of about one billion people whose jobs increasingly involved moving bits of information around and the first generation, the millennials, that have grown up in s connected enviroment.
Kelly believes that the combination of people, connectivity and silicon
is creating a global super organism, and we are at the beginning of a century
long process of creating “a new mind for an old species”. This is not a utopia,
there will be firewalls, corporate monopolies, unequal access, and the rich
will be privileged, as always. Nevertheless, he is optimistic that centralised
authority and uniformity will diminish, while the techno-cultural forces he
discusses come to dominate institutions and peoples’ lives. Maybe, but he
heavily discounts the forces of reaction to his trends, because he sees them as
inevitable and irresistible.
*
Robin Hanson is known for his work in creating prediction markets in the
1990s, but he is a genuine polymath with a background in physics, early AI and
economics. His book
The Age of Em: Work,
Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth is one of the strangest, most
challenging books I have ever read. It is an extended analysis of a single ‘baseline’
scenario of brain emulations, or ‘ems’, a technology he sees as feasible within
the next century, with implications so great they should be seriously
considered.
Whole brain emulation is one of the possible pathways to artificial
intelligence. Unlike alternatives such as building an artificial brain neuron
by neuron or designing a conscious machine, a brain emulation comes with a
personality and previous life, and will go on to have many more experiences.
Hanson’s scenario is actually about what a society made up of many artificial
intelligences might be like, so there is little discussion of what humans do
and how they interact with ems.
These brain emulations are, of course, digital copies of an existing
brain, so they can be easily created, copied and shared. They will live in a
virtual world, but can inhabit robotic bodies when required. They will think
and feel like humans, remembering their past and be capable of learning. They
do, however, come at a cost in terms of energy, hardware and resources, which
means they live in “a few tall hot densely packed cities where the volume is
about equally split between racks of computer hardware and pipes for cooling
and transport”. The interplay between cost and performance underpins much of
his, highly speculative, analysis.
This is because em minds can run at different speeds, from perhaps one
million times slower than humans to one million times faster, and the cost to
run an em is proportional to its speed. Faster ems have higher status, and for
those with robotic bodies their bodies are proportionally smaller. A typical em
running a thousand times faster than human speed would be 2mm tall. The
implications of this for em subjective time and capacity for work are analysed
at length. At one thousand times faster than human speed, one human year is a millennium
to an em. They will, however, require rest, sex and relaxation, and eventually
retire at some very slow speed. All this is analysed at length.
The basic characteristic of ems is that they are a scan of a specific
brain, thus carry in them the experience, talent and traits of an individual.
Therefore, only the world’s best are likely to be copied, perhaps less than a
thousand people, and those ems will them copy themselves to form clans: “Strong
competitive pressures result in most ems being copies of the thousand humans
best suited for em jobs. Ems are mostly very able focused workaholics at the
level of Olympic medallists, billionaires or heads of state.” They are mostly
happy, but can be moody, just like people. They have hierarchies, partners and long-term relationships.
The em economy will grow very quickly once started, perhaps doubling
every month or so, driven mainly by population growth. Their clans specialise, have
big financial and reputational investments in their subsidiary firms, and ems have less variation
in wages and productivity. With many copies, em wages are at subsistence levels
(i.e. running costs) and well below human wages. Humans will have to live off
their investments in the em economy, which has high returns from its rapid
growth, and some of the em economy does projects and production useful to humans.
Managing the transition to an em economy will be challenging, particularly as it has the rapid expansion characteristic found in other AI scenarios. This is an important issue, so Hanson's scenario allows the question of where the first em city might be built. and his view that if only
“a few suitable enough places give the new em economy sufficient support, opposition
in other places would then be quickly overwhelmed by very rapid growth in those
few areas.” Once started, the transition will happen one way or another. In
fact what this depicts is an entirely digital economy, with ems managing all
production and distribution. Exactly what and why they are producing anything
is not clear.
This future is one of an em dominated economy, because they are so
efficient, coordinated and well organised they take over. Hanson
finishes his book with suggestions on how humans can prepare for the coming of
an em economy, the policy options that could be considered, and strategies to
use. He sees “many ways for individuals to work to help deal with the possible
coming of an em world”, but “to succeed in this new world, prepare to become
what it needs”. Whatever that may be.
Hanson seems to see the em era as the next stage in the evolution of humanity, a
continuation of the progression from foraging to farming to the industrial age
of the present. He points out that lives in the future may be as different from
our lives today as we are from foragers and farmers: “If you understood just how different your ancestors were, you’d
realise that you should expect your descendants to seem quite strange”. This view is one he shares with Yuval Noah Harari,
who also starts with a similar long view of stages of development.
*
Harari is the author of
Sapiens: A
Brief History of Mankind, which explored the development of society and
economy as humans’ abilities increased over millennia. From the prehistoric Cognitive
Revolution to the Industrial Revolution and the discovery of the scientific
method he draws a picture of progress and challenges. His follow-up is
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, an equally bold and expansive take on
the big issues in the evolution of humanity, technology and society. He starts
with the observation that of the perhaps 70 billion humans to have existed so
far, the great majority died from famine, plague and war. That all changed in
the 20
th century, and now humanity needs new challenges.
The first is aging and dying. The science of regenerative medicine is
advancing quickly, with the unravelling of the molecular structure of cells,
genetic engineering and nanotechnology well underway. Over the coming decades
life expectancy will continue to rise and at some point death will become much
less common, often due to misadventure. This is Harari’s technique, take a
topic like death, designer babies, animal minds, consciousness or free will, and
investigate it using the latest science. Many people would find his conclusions
disturbing, as humanity reaches for his goals of immortality, bliss and
divinity. Bliss is happiness and divinity is power, essentially power over
nature. Both largely come from the combination of upgraded humans with machine
intelligence, producing Homo Deus. His website leads with "History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods".
The decoupling of intelligence from consciousness is an important part of
the scenarios Harari investigates. An intelligent machine is not a conscious
one, we have lots of the former and none of the latter. Meaning and purpose are
human qualities: “Yet over decades and centuries the web of meaning unravels
and a new web is spun in its place. To study history means to watch this
spinning and unravelling of these webs, and to realise that what seems to
people in one age the most important thing in life becomes utterly meaningless
to their descendants.”
The key to humanity’s success as a species is large-scale cooperation.
This allows institutions to create meaningful stories about their purpose, culture,
nation or religion. Harari calls these stories ‘fictions’. However, powerful
institutions can evolve into entrenched bureaucracies: “Corporations, money and
nations exist only in our imaginations. We invented them to serve us; how come
we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service?”
The answer is what he calls humanism, a broad-based shift that started in
the 17th century when we gave up believing in a cosmic plan to gain
power over the physical world. We exercise that power through scientific
progress and economic growth, and have thus solved the problems of plague and
famine, and haven’t had a large war for some time. Humanism sees life as a
gradual process of inner change, developing knowledge through a variety of
experiences, and puts people at the centre. Because those experiences belong to
an individual, they should be given as much freedom as possible to experience
the world. Thus, individual liberty within a democratic system is the ideal state.
A humanist civilisation will invest in science to increase lifespans,
improve peoples’ cognitive abilities and research new, powerful technologies. If
genetic engineering and artificial intelligence are the means to achieve those
goals, they will be pursued. The irony is that these technologies will also
allow us to design the human experiences, the emotions and desires of people,
that humanism places at the centre of the universe. At the end of chapter eight
we come to the crux of the matter: “We are about to face a flood of extremely
useful devices, tools and structures that make no allowance for the free will
of individual humans. Can democracy, the free market and human rights survive the
flood?”.
The 20th century provided mass education and mass health, to
provide the manpower needed in factories and armies. In the 21st
century there may be much less demand for the lower skilled workers that system
produced. Therefore, elites maybe more interested in upgrading a few million
rich people, rather than investing in fixing the problems of hundreds of
millions of poor people. This would result in a small elite of upgraded
superhumans with exceptional physical, emotional and intellectual abilities, and
they would have quite different experiences to the rest of humankind. The alternative would be large scale upgrading, with cultures like the Amish being the exception. There is already an active biohacking movement.
Harari thinks upgraded humans could develop two new techno-religions to
replace humanism, in the same way as humanism replaced belief systems and theology.
The first, techno-humanism, believes we should use technology to upgrade to a
superior human model, from Homo sapien to Homo deus. With upgrades like genetic
engineering, nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces, humans will be able
to hold their own against intelligent but not conscious machines, and their
combined abilities will spark a new cognitive revolution as important as the agricultural
revolution 7,000 years ago. It’s a recognisable version of evolutionary
humanism that is reasonably comforting.
Unlike the alternative. He asks “What might replace desires and
experiences as the source of all meaning and authority?” The answer is
information, and the religion that worships information is Dataism. The
universe is reduced to data flows and we understand life as data processing and
decision-making. Organisms are algorithms, markets and politics are information
flows, markets are flexible and adaptive, politics is not. Freedom of
information becomes the new greatest good, replacing liberty and equality.
In this world, the generating and sharing of data is the best
contribution we can make. Whether it’s answering emails, going to work, or
posting on Facebook, it all contributes to the data flow. One bit of data is as
good as another, but only humans share their experiences as data. However, Dataism
sees those experiences as biochemical algorithms, purely physical processes
that can be known and understood, and uploaded into a universal
Internet-of-All-Things.
Using the data stored in the Internet-of-All-Things, non-conscious but
highly intelligent algorithms get to know us better than we know ourselves. How
this might affect society, politics and daily life is discussed at length. Harari
sees Dataism as the scientific paradigm of the 21st century, as everything
gets reduced to algorithms and data processing. Over the century everything and
everybody could eventually get connected to the Internet-of-All-Things and the
data it collects will be used to help us gain immortality, bliss and power. On
the other hand, once the thing is up and running we may dissolve in the data
flow “like a clump of earth within a gushing river”.
*
These four writers are contributing to a debate about a future living
with automation and machine intelligence that’s been going for a few years now.
They are not making predictions, but extrapolating from trends that are already
visible. They consider the implications of those trends and develop possible
futures. It is mostly very analytical, with each writer laying a logical trail
through their ideas to the main points and conclusions. They build their
scenarios with care. Like them or not, those scenarios shine a light on an
uncertain future and help frame questions and issues that need to be addressed. In all these futures there is an expanding digital world
running parallel to the physical world we humans have lived in, and on, so far.
Just where the dividing line between the digital and physical worlds will
end up in another hundred years is, I think, the great unanswered question. A wide range of different
degrees of integration in the medium-term seems plausible, similar to the
digital divide that exists today with access to broadband. Over the longer run
an extreme version of the digital economy seems possible, maybe like one run by
ems. How long is that? No-one knows, but it’s worth thinking about.
Frase, P. 2016. Four Futures: Life
After Capitalism. London: Verso.
Hanson, R. 2016. The Age of Em:
Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Harari, Y. N. 2016.
Homo Deus: A
Brief History of Tomorrow. London: Harvill Secker.
Kelly K. 2016. The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological
Forces That Will Shape Our Future, New
York: Viking.
The holiday post a year after this one is called Rethinking the Deep Past.
