The Future Is Now [1/3]
When algorithms rule the world 🤖 🌎
“The Future is Now” is a compilation of some of the most relevant ideas found in 21 Lessons for the XXI Century, a best selling book by Yuval Noah Harari
Artificial Intelligence
AI and biotechnology are offering us the power to completely redesign life and if we don’t know what to do with this power, the market won’t wait a thousand years for an answer. Things will happen.
In the past, machines used to compete with humans in terms of strength and physical abilities. Now, machines have learned how to learn, analyze, communicate, and most importantly, understand human emotions.
If we take into account that emotions are nothing else than biochemical algorithms, we should also understand that machines are amazing at working with algorithms, and as a consequence, could perfectly understand our emotions. Even better than a Homo sapiens can.
Healthcare
Scientists predict that with the current advancements in our knowledge about the brain, it could be in 2050 that machines could outperform human psychologists.
We shouldn’t compare the capacities of a single person to ones of a single computer. Computers can communicate in a matter of seconds. Just think about COVID. What if it were machines the ones diagnosing this disease and telling every other machine in the system what’s going on. Would’ve that helped to even prevent the outbreak?
On the other hand, what if a single machine makes a mistake when prescribing a certain medicine or treatment, and others with the same algorithm do? That wouldn’t only be dangerous for one patient but for potentially millions.
People will enjoy wonderful healthcare services. But since there will always be something to improve, and medicine will become so precise, we may always be sick too.
Emotions and Art
Some argue that creative jobs such as being an artist will never be taken by machines. Up to date, that has been true. We no longer need humans to sell music. We can now find it easily on Spotify, but there are still people creating music.
Despite that fact, in the longe term, it is certain that no current job will be left without a certain degree of automation.
When art is created, we tend to evaluate it according to people’s perspective on it. To the emotions that it produces in us.
Now, what if AI could perfectly understand our emotions. Better than Shakespeare, Frida Kahlo, or Beyoncé? And therefore create art in such a precise way that it could even be called manipulation of our feelings?
With Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), what if algorithms could understand how we feel when we listen to a certain music genre or artist on Spotify and base its recommendations off of that?
In short, that algorithm could know which biochemical buttons to press in order to create a global hit in music, painting, or any other art.
As a start, they wouldn’t need to be better than Chaikovski. They only need to outperform Britney Spears.
Jobs
Thanks to AI being applied the healthcare, a person with a cellphone, living in a rural area, will then have the same chances to get medical advice as a person living in a developed city today.
Instead of competing against AI, we could focus on its maintenance and use. This way, 2050 would look more like collaboration human-AI instead of competing in a race that we won’t ultimately win.
The key invention will be biometrical sensors that can live inside ourselves, measuring every aspect of our health, and sending that info into smartphones and laptops so they can store, analyze, interpret and show that information to us in real-time.
Google’s Long Term Mission
We’re not only Google’s customer, but its product
Nowadays, engineers are working on creating algorithms that can detect and identify emotions based on the movement of our eyes and facial muscles. Add a good camera to TVs, and the algorithm will know which scenes made us laugh, feel sadness, or boredom.
Mix that with biometric sensors, and the algorithm will know with preciseness, photogram per photogram, how we reacted to the movie. When we fake laughing, we use different muscles than those we use when we genuinely laugh. The algorithm will know it.
This goes further than choosing which movie or book to read, soon algorithms could be helping us make more important decisions in our lives such as whom to marry, or which career to study.
Ethics & Decisions
This isn’t something that will happen in 10 or 30 years. We are already trusting Google’s algorithm to take important decisions such as looking for reliable information, or deciding where to go (Google Maps).
We learn this by experience. The first time we used Google Maps, we may have been a little skeptical, and not followed the precise route that it marked. Then, we tried using that “fast route”, we got faster to our destination, and next time we decide to trust it more than the road we previously knew.
The youngest generations could even grow without that orientation ability, at least at the degree that their grandparents used to. The same could happen with the ability to make other more important decisions.
At the same time of reducing the number of car accidents, self-driving cars raise important ethical questions. Should the car save people crossing the street, or the owner of the car, in a conflictive scenario?
A possible solution to this ethical problem may be that when you want to buy your Tesla car, you may decide between an altruistic algorithm or an egoistic one. The altruistic would save other people before than yourself. The other would do the opposite.
Furthermore, in the future we could face not group discrimination, but individual discrimination in which the algorithm finds something that it doesn’t like about our DNA sequence, and we wouldn’t be able to organize a huge protest, because it’s not a categorized discrimination. It’s only against us.
Consciousness
Science fiction’s greatest sin is to confuse intelligence with consciousness.
In terms of consciousness, there are three options: either consciousness is completely related to organic biochemistry so non-organic organisms cannot have it. Consciousness doesn’t need organic, so maybe robots can have it even if they aren’t better than humans at that. Or consciousness isn’t related at all to the organic, but to intelligence, so machines could develop it quite well.
The problem comes when we invest a lot in improving Artificial Intelligence and not ours, especially understanding our own consciousness. This way, AI could only be useful to strengthen human stupidity.
Lessons
- Science fiction is the most important genre of our times. It educates people about the future that’s coming. Although its greatest sin is to confuse consciousness with intelligence.
- It’s important that we understand our own mind before algorithms do so for ourselves. Personal observation has never been easy, but it will eventually become more difficult
- To prevent AI from being too better than us, we should invest the same time to improving AI than to doing research about our consciousness
- In the long term, the real business behind Google is not to sell advertisements. Is to get our information, know our deepest secrets, and even create new kinds of artificial life. They value their apps according to how much data they get. Not to how much money they can make with them in the short-term.
- Does data like our DNA, or thoughts belong to us, the government, a company, or to humanity? Regulating who possesses that data is the most important thing
- Instead of competing against AI, we could focus on its maintenance
- In the XXI century, data will be the most important possession and if few people own it, others could become irrelevant. The secret to controlling this is controlling who possesses that data
Read 21 Lessons for the XXI Century, by Yuval Noah Harari!
HHey! I’m Sofi, a 16-year-old girl who’s extremely passionate about biotech, human longevity, and innovation itself 🦄. I’m learning a lot about exponential technologies to start a company that impacts the world positively 🚀. I love writing articles about scientific innovations to show you the amazing future that awaits us!
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