Why you are important... historically so
Why you are important... historically so
Connors Note:
As we start off the new year, it is a time for us to take a step back and look at the big picture. It's a time for new year’s resolutions, self-reflection, and new gym memberships that we are absolutely totally gonna use this time.
For me, this kind of big-picture thinking has always been a sort of escape. I've always found it fun to hypothesize about what the long-term future will look like. So in a way, that's what this piece is about - a place for me to geek out about the big-picture stuff I've been thinking about lately. Truthfully this piece is a bit more “out there” and much less grounded in data than what I usually write, but grant me this indulgence.?
Each of these topics are something I could (and probably will) make a full article about, so this is more just a brief introduction to these topics as a whole.?
Introduction:
Does it feel to you like the world is moving faster and faster, and highly impactful events come at a rate unlike anything we've seen before? Well, there is a reason for that feeling. It’s because it’s all true. Big society-level events, like the coronavirus, political turmoil, and large-scale international confrontations, are becoming more common, and everyone can feel it. On the other hand, new paradigm-shifting technology seems to come out every 2 years. Much of this tech is positive—it makes our lives better—but as a result, we've become accustomed to the fact that some new thing will come along that will change our lives drastically. However if you look at human history, this is the first time this is the case.?
Well, this is not going to stop any time soon. In fact, we are entering what may be one of the most impactful centuries in the history of humanity. To make that sentence scarier, I do not mean up until this point. I literally mean that millenia from now, our species may well look back at this century and say "that was one of the big ones." What happens over the next few decades may end up affecting nothing less than the future of humanity.?
Scary or not, this state of affairs means you, yes you, are important! It does not matter how insignificant you think the work you do is, or how little you feel it contributes. You just being here makes you one of the most important humans to ever live.
Looking forward:
Bear with me here for a second, I promise this is actually going somewhere. In the year 10,000 BC, there were around 4 million people on Earth. For a long time that really didn't change. People lived how their parents and their grandparents lived before them. It took 11,800 years to reach 1 billion people (around 1800). It took 130 years to double. Then 45 years to do it again. Now, just 200 years after we hit our first billion, we are at nearly 8 billion.
Modern humans have only existed for around 190,000 years. Most mammal species live around 1 million years. I think most people either believe that humanity will either live far longer than that, or far FAR shorter. But? if we follow the typical mammalian species (e.g., if we don’t destroy ourselves) and stay at our current population size, future humans would outnumber us ten thousand to 1. Just like a young child, the choices made now trickle out to the rest of your life much more than ones later, and the challenges we face now are just that much more important.
Right now:
For better or worse--and probably both--this century will most likely see multiple black swan events that will change the very nature of what it means to be human. For what may truly be the first time, we are being faced with something that will affect ALL people on Earth. We have been talking about climate change for some time now, but only in the past two decades has it become something that the world has started addressing collectively (whether sufficiently or in time are different questions.) In fact, climate change may be the best example we have of what we may need to do a lot over the next few decades - make drastic decisions as a whole species for the good of not just us, but our children, and our children's children.
Energy - the golden ticket
You may have heard the news that the first net energy positive fusion reaction just took place at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. You may have also heard that this is just one step closer to actually using fusion to produce limitless clean energy. It's true, because of the efficiency of the lasers used to create the fusion we are nowhere close to hooking it up to the grid. But the old adage that "fusion is 30 years away and always will be" may actually be right this time. For decades we made little to no progress on net positive energy, and in the past decade, we have made huge step after huge step. This may be a somewhat symbolic one, but it is still a monumental step. We may still be decades away from fusion powering our energy grid, but this shows that for maybe the first time, we are making real progress.?
What happens when we actually solve fusion in an economically viable way will be nothing short of revolutionary. Forget just solving climate change, think bigger. Limitless energy means no more wars over oil, unlimited processing time for computers to solve our most complicated problems, and ever-expanding economies of scale. After all, energy is the root of everything. Some of the most significant benefits include:
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"The Fountain of Youth: How to Live Forever (or at least until the robots take over)"
For most of human history, life expectancy was around 30 years old. Around the same time as the population jump, we also began making massive leaps in modern medicine. It is for that reason that for most developed nations, life expectancy jumped up in 1800, and now sits around 80 years old. While this marks one of the singular greatest achievements in human history, the results have begun to plateau. We are no longer making the massive strides in increasing our lifespan that we once were, and the last years of most of our lives are spent sick and in pain.
This began to change when in 2012 Shinya Yamanaka discovered how to transform ordinary adult skin cells into essentially embryonic stem cells, which are capable of developing into any cell in the human body. Studies into the application of this process have returned some incredible results. In mice, these reprogramming techniques have not only extended lifespans, they possibly reversed the aging process. Research into this area is still young, but in just 10 years, age reversal has gone from myth to an actual possibility in the near future.?
The effects this would have on humanity would be profound. If everyone is living longer, and healthier lives, the entire structure on which we have built our society would need rethinking. Things like when we get married and have kids, when we retire, and how we decide to live our lives would be changed forever. This could lead to problems like overpopulation the likes of which we have never seen, or even more dystopian problems like rich people living extra long and locking up their wealth from the rest of society.?
AI - more than just chat
The thing that really prompted me to write this article was the release of ChatGPT. If you haven't used it yet, I highly recommend it. It is truly the first time the average person has been able to interact with and create with the assistance of an AI. It's simple and impressive. It has its problems, yes (like the fact that it says incorrect things with the utmost confidence), but this technology is in its infancy. Right now, we use AI to do things like make cool pictures (see below) and write emails, but things like ChatGPT are to General AI as a baby is to Einstein.
According to a survey of top AI experts, the first artificial general intelligence (an AI capable of learning and improving itself to handle any task) will come sometime in the next 20-50 years. That’s a big range but one thing is for sure: it is coming, and when it does, it will make the industrial revolution seem like a tiny blip. The idea of an AI that can improve itself without the need for our intervention could create an intelligence the likes of which we have never seen.?
The thing to keep in mind is that this isn't an all-or-nothing conjecture. We don't have to create a true AGI for this to be society changing. Even small, incremental improvements in AI will make seismic shifts in our everyday life and the speed at which we make discoveries. AI is already being used in the medical field to predict the folding structure of proteins. Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology says: This will change medicine. It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything.”
The question then becomes, what happens when AI can do our jobs better than we can? If we can truly replace most jobs with a machine one of three things will happen:?
1: We all find new jobs that have yet to be created (as has happened before).
2: We become a utopia where the need for jobs disappears and we become a post-scarcity society.
3: The output of AI becomes controlled by a few organizations or governments and they become too powerful to do anything about.
You
With these monumental changes coming, it's up to us to decide how we handle them. We could be on the cusp of locking in thousands of years of incredible progress, or something much darker. Whichever way these technologies affect the world, their impact will affect nearly countless future people unlike any technological progress we have seen up until this point in our history.
Of all human beings you could have been born as you were born at this moment. Regardless of what you do with that time, that makes you important. At the very least, you might get to see some crazy shit.