From my new book 'Technology vs Humanity'...

First posted at TechvsHuman.com.  Pre-order the book on Amazon (Kindle only), or pre-order the print version at a discount via my publisher. 

How will humanity prevail in the face of rapid and all-encompassing technological change?

Our world is entering a period of truly transformative change, and many of us will be surprised by the scale and pace of developments we simply hadn’t anticipated. Tremendous potential lies in these exponential technological advances, yet with these new opportunities also come tremendous new responsibilities. An avalanche of technological changes will reshape the very essence of humanity and touch every aspect of life of our planet.

In the past, each radical shift in human society has been driven primarily by one key enabling shift factor – from wood, stone, bronze and iron to steam, electricity, factory automation and the Internet. Today, however a combinatory set of science- and technology-enabled megashifts are coming together that will redraw not only commerce, culture and society but also our biology and our ethics.

Let me be clear about this book: Technology vs. Humanity is neither a celebration of the rapidly onrushing technology revolution nor a lament on the fall of civilization. If, like me, you’re a movie buff, then you’ve probably already had more than enough of Hollywood’s utopian visions and dystopian warnings. The future will not be created based on fear!

My goal with this book is to amplify and accelerate the debate about how to can guide, harness and control the development of science and technology so that they fulfil their primary purpose which – in my view- is to serve humanity, and to further human flourishing around the planet.

My ambition is to take the discussion way beyond the realms of the exuberant technologists or thoughtful analysts and academics to express a set of concerns that are nowhere near to being addressed, or even recognized by the population at large. As a futurist – and increasingly more of a nowist – I am also hoping to give real presence and current urgency to a future that still seems beyond comprehension and unworthy of attention for many.

As such, this book is deliberately designed to be a passionate discussion starter for what I believe to currently be the world’s most important conversation. I believe my role here is to open up and catalyze the debate, hence I have set out to craft a spirited manifesto rather than a guidebook. And of course, going forward, many of my talks, keynotes and films will expand on the themes outlined in the book, as well.

I believe we need to step back from an expert debate about what’s possible and how to achieve it, and start with a more fundamental exploration of purpose and meaning, and define what role we want these transformative technologies to play in serving humanity: just because we can, it doesn’t mean we should!

In the book, I have set out what I believe to be the driving forces of change, and present an assessment of their potential impacts and implications. I have highlighted many fundamental questions raised by the accelerated and exponential pace of development across multiple fields of science and technology.  I argue to place human happiness and wellbeing at the heart of the decision making and governance processes that will shape future investments in scientific and technological research, development and commercialisation – because in the end, technology is not what we seek, but how we seek.

 A PROLOGUE TO THE FUTURE

Humanity will change more in the next 20 years than in the previous 300 years

Human beings often extrapolate the future from the present, or even the past. The assumption is that whatever worked well for us up to now should in some slightly improved shape or form also serve us nicely in the future. Yet the new reality is that because of the increased impact of exponential and combinatorial technological changes (as I will explain throughout this book) the future is actually very unlikely to be an extension of the present. Rather, it is certain to be utterly different – because the framework and the underlying logic has changed. Therefore, in my work as a futurist I try to intuit, imagine and immerse myself in the near-future (5-8 years) and then work my way back from there rather than towards it.

This book is both a report from that future and a kind of manifesto, a passionate call to stop and think before we all get swept up in the magic vortex of technology, and eventually become less rather than more human. Right now is a good time to remember that the future does not just happen to us – it is created by us, every day, and we will be held responsible for the decisions we make at this very moment.

I feel that we are living in one of the most exciting times in the history of mankind, and I am generally very optimistic about the future. However, we definitely need to define and practice a more holistic approach to technology in order to safeguard the very essence of what being human means.

We are at the inflection point of an exponential curve in many fields of science and technology, a point  where the doubling from each measurement period to the next is becoming vastly more significant (see  Moore’s Law). This exponential pace of development is now evident everywhere including in fields such as deep learning, genetics, material sciences anng. The time required for each exponential performance step is also declining in many fields, and this is driving the potential for fundamental change across every activity on the planet. In practical terms, we are now past the stage in the life of the curve where it was difficult to gauge that something is happening, at all, i.e. we are no longer moving in small steps from 0.01 to 0.02 or 0.04 to 0.08.

At the same time, fortunately, we are not yet at the point where those doublings are so great that the results will overwhelm our understanding and inhibit our capacity to act. To put things in perspective, in my view we are at a relative performance level of around four in most fields, and the next exponential step will take us to eight, rather than a more linear rise to five! This is the very moment when exponential increases are starting to really matter, and technology is now driving exponential changes in every sector of our society, from energy, transportation, communications and media, to medical, health, food and energy.

Witness the recent changes in the car industry – during the past seven years we’ve gone from electric cars with a range of less than 50 miles to the latest Tesla and BMWi8 promising over 300 miles on a single charge. We’ve also gone from a handful of charging locations to the astounding fact that New York City already has more electric vehicle (EV) charging stations than gas stations. Nearly every month there’s a new breakthrough in battery efficiency, a limitation which has for the past decades been one of the biggest barriers to mass adoption of electric vehicles. Soon we’ll charge our EVs just once a week, then once a month, and eventually once a year – and very few people will still be interested in traditional luxury cars with good old gas engines!

Witness the even more dramatic cost decline in human genome sequencing, with the price falling from around $10 million in 2008 to approximately $800 today. Imagine what might happen when exponentially more powerful supercomputers move into the cloud and become available to every medical facility or lab: the cost of sequencing an individual’s genome should quickly drop below $50. Next, imagine the genome profiles of some 2 Billion people uploaded to a secure cloud (hopefully in an anonymized way!) for use in research, development and analysis — much of it performed by artificial intelligence (AI) running on those very same supercomputers. The scientific possibilities that will be unleashed will blow away anything we have dreamed of while simultaneously bringing enormous ethical challenges: dramatic longevity increases for those that have the budget, the ability to re-program the human genome, and—potentially—the end of ageing, or even dying. Will the rich live forever while the poor still can’t even afford malaria pills?

 Such exponential developments suggest that continuing to imagine our future in a linear way will probably lead to catastrophically flawed assumptions about the scale, speed and potential impacts of change. That may be part of the reason why so many people cannot seem to grasp the growing concerns about technology trumping humanity—it all seems so far away, and, for now, rather harmless because we are only at four on this curve. Issues such as the increasing loss of privacy, technological unemployment or human de-skilling are still not in-our-face enough – but this is bound to change very quickly!

It is also important to realize that the biggest shifts will happen because of combinatorial innovation, i.e. by exploiting several of the megashifts (as explained in chapter 4) and elements of disruption at the same time. For example, we are increasingly seeing companies combining Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT) concepts along with AI, mobility, and the cloud to create extremely disruptive new offerings (see chapter 4 on Megashifts).

Suffice to say that nothing and no one will be untouched by the changes in store for us, whether they are realized with good will, while ignoring or neglecting to consider the unintended consequences, or with harmful intent. On the one hand, unimaginable technological breakthroughs may dramatically improve our lives and hugely further human flourishing (see chapter 10, on happiness and for what exactly flourishing may mean in the future). On the other hand, some of these exponential technological changes are quite likely to threaten the very fabric of society, and ultimately question our very humanness.

In 1993, computer scientist (and famed science fiction author) Vernor Vinge wrote: Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive?

 Welcome to HellVen!

It is quickly becoming clear that the future of man-machine relations very much depends on the economic system that creates them. We are facing what I like to call HellVen (i.e., a blend of hell/heaven) challenges (#hellven). We are moving at warp speed towards a world that on the one hand may resemble Nirvana, where we may no longer have to work for a living, most problems are solved by technology, and we enjoy a kind of universal abundance—sometimes referred to as the ‘Star Trek economy‘

Or on the other hand, the future could usher in a dystopian society that is orchestrated and overseen by supercomputers, networked bots and super-intelligent software agents—machines and algorithms, cyborgs and robots – or rather, by those who own them; a world where non-augmented humans might be tolerated as pets or as a necessary nuisance at best, or enslaved by a cabal of cyborg gods at worst; a dark society that would be de-skilled, de-sensitized, disembodied, and altogether de-humanized.

“You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.”― Nikola Tesla

Is this a paranoid view?

Let’s consider what some of us are already witnessing in our daily lives: low-cost, ubiquitous digital technologies have made it possible for us to outsource our thinking, our decisions, and our memories to ever-cheaper mobile devices and the intelligent clouds behind them. These ‘external brains’ are morphing quickly from knowing-me to representing-me to being-me. In fact, they are starting to become a digital copy of us – and if that thought is not worrying you yet, imagine this amplified 100x in the next 5 years.

Navigating a strange city? Impossible without Google Maps. Can’t decide where to eat tonight? TripAdvisor will tell me. No time to answer all my emails? Gmail’s new intelligent assistant will do it for me.

As far as man-machine convergence is concerned, we’re not quite in a world where we stay at home while our cyborg doubles live out our lives for us, as in the 2009 Bruce Willis film Surrogates. Nor are we yet able to purchase human-like synths that can undertake a range of tasks and provide companionship as in the 2015 AMC TV series Humans — but we’re not that far away, either.

In 'Technology vs Humanity' I explain why I do not think the dystopian scenario is likely to happen. At the same time, I will argue that we are now facing some fundamental choices when it comes to deciding and planning how far we will allow technology to impact and shape our lives, the lives of our loved ones, and the lives of future generations. Some pundits may say we already are beyond the point of preventing such changes, and that this is just the next stage in our ‘natural’ evolution. I strongly disagree and will explain how I think humans can emerge as winners in this coming clash between man and machines.

Technology and humanity are converging, and we are at a pivot point

As I started writing this book and weaving the themes into my talks, three important words rose to the top and stood out – exponential, combinatorial and recursive.

1. Exponential. Technology is progressing exponentially e.g. 1-2-4-8-16, not 1-2-3-4-5 etc. Even though the basic laws of physics may prevent microchips from becoming significantly smaller than they already are today, technological progress in general is still following Moore’s Law. The performance vs cost-curve continues to rise exponentially, not in the gradual or linear way humans tend to understand and expect. This represents a huge cognitive challenge for us: Technology grows exponentially, while humans (hopefully, I would add) remain linear.

2. Combinatorial. Technological advances are being combined and integrated. Game-changing advances such as machine intelligence and deep learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), and human genome editing are beginning to intersect and amplify each other. They are no longer applied just in specific individual domains – instead they are causing ripples across a multitude of sectors. For example, advanced human gene editing technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9 may eventually allow us to beat cancer and dramatically increase longevity. These are developments that would upend the entire logic of medical care and health, social security, work, and even capitalism itself. (Note: the chart used in my slide below is inspired by Frank Diana)

 3. Technologies such as AI, cognitive computing, and deep learning may eventually lead to recursive (i.e., self-amplifying) improvements. For example, we are already seeing the first examples of robots that can reprogram or upgrade themselves or control the power grid that keeps them alive, potentially leading to what has been called an intelligence explosion. Some, such as Oxford academic Nick Bostrom believe this could lead to the emergence of super-intelligence — AI systems which could one day learn faster, and out-think humans in almost every regard. If we can engineer AIs with an IQ of 500, what would keep us from building other ones with an IQ of 50,000 — and what would happen if we did?

Thankfully, recursive super-intelligence is not yet on the immediate horizon. However, even without such challenges, we are already grappling with some rapidly escalating issues, such as the constant tracking of our digital lives, surveillance-by-default, the deskilling of our kids, diminishing privacy, the loss of anonymity, digital identity theft, data security, and much more. That is why I am convinced the groundwork for the future of humanity—positive or dystopian — is being laid here, today.... READ MORE

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