“AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future” is a very interesting book. A combination of 10 stories (science fiction), followed by an interpretation. Using 2041 as the lens. The message is that things are going quicker, with a reference to 4 books to proof it.
Science fiction and strategy
Yuval Noah Harari has called science fiction “the most important artistic genre” of our time. It frames our future, and it is increasingly used as a tool for strategy development and scenario planning.
I think it is easiest to cover some of the concepts in the book and let you read the stories yourself:
- The Internet of 2020 is almost one trillion times larger than the Internet of 1995.
- Using “time well spent” as a metric instead of simple “time spent” as an internet metric.
- Fairness and bias issues with AI will require substantial efforts to address them.
- ESG AI.
- An AI Hippocratic oath.
- The use of smart biometrics for criminal investigations and forensics.
- The advent of medical nanobots will offer numerous capabilities that surpass human surgeons.
- Data poisoning.
- In two decades, COVID-19 will be remembered not just as a pandemic, but as an automation-accelerating event.
- XR contact lenses.
- XR “is like dreaming with your eyes open.” Read “Our Next Reality“.
- Somatosensory second skin.
- Bone-conducting, omni-binaural immersive sound.
- The invisible smartstream.
- Digital immortality or digital reincarnation.
- Augmented roads and cities.
- In a world of automated terrorism, one person can destroy said world. Read “That you for being late”.
- The capabilities of autonomous weapons will be limited more by the laws of physics—for example, by constraints on range, speed, and payload—than by any deficiencies in the AI.
- Occupational restoration companies.
- A deeper interdependence between AI optimisations and “human touch” will reinvent many jobs and create new ones.
- With the right training and the right tools, we can expect an AI-led renaissance that will enable and celebrate creativity, compassion, and humanity.
- How can AI measure and improve our happiness?
- AI will be able to detect human emotions (happy, sad, disgusted, surprised, angered, or fearful) much more accurately than people can.
- GDPR has the vision of ultimately giving data back to the individual, to help people control who gets to see and use their data, and even derive value from licensing their data. In general, GDPR is an impediment to AI.
- Who can be trusted to store all our data?
- Blockchain, data and AI
- What about a twenty-first-century digital commune consisting of people who share common values and are willing to contribute their data to help all members of the commune, based on a common understanding of how members’ data will be used and protected?
- Homomorphic encryption encrypts the data in a way that the AI owner cannot decrypt.
- AI and other technologies will drive down the cost of almost all goods, most of which will be produced for next to nothing.
- BLC, or Basic Life Card, which guaranteed that every citizen who opted in would receive a monthly allowance to cover the cost of food, shelter, utilities, transportation, health, and even basic entertainment and clothing.
- When the cost of energy plummets, it will also bring down the cost of water, raw materials, manufacturing, computation, logistics, and anything that has a major energy component. Read “Stellar”.
- The age of plenitude will arrive when most things are no longer scarce, can be produced for next to nothing, and—most important—are made available freely or cheaply to all people.
- In 2020, the United States discarded $218 billion worth of food, while the cost to eliminate hunger in the United States has been estimated at just $25 billion per year.
- In the United States, there are more than five times as many unoccupied houses as there are homeless people.
- Economic models for scarcity and post-scarcity
- Star Trek provides a fascinating future vision. In his book Trekonomics, Manu Saadia describes the Star Trek economic model, which is encapsulated in Captain Picard’s famous declaration that “people are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things.
- The disappearance of scarcity will cause deflation, leading to a collapse of prices and eventually markets.
- The systemic problem is that corporations will refuse to accept the end of scarcity.
- Which singularity vision—cyborgs or machine overlords—might arrive by 2041? Read “The Singularity is Nearer“.
The end of the book
We will not be passive spectators in the story of AI—we are the authors of it. And if we have faith that human-AI symbiosis is much greater than the sum of the two parts, then we will work to mould AI into a perfect complement to help us “boldly go where no one has gone before.” We will explore new worlds with AI, but, more importantly, we will explore ourselves. It will give us a comfortable life and a sense of security, pushing us to pursue love and self-actualisation. AI will reduce our fear, vanity, and greed, helping us to connect with more noble human needs and wants. AI will take care of all that is routine, invigorating us to explore what makes us human and what our destiny should be.
The dance
In the story of AI and humans, if we get the dance between artificial intelligence and human society right, it would unquestionably be the single greatest achievement in human history.
