“An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man’s knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the waters.”

― Jerome Lawrence, Inherit the Wind

I remember dressing up for Halloween as a little kid. One of my earliest memories as a child is going as a cameraman, imitating my father. He works as a cameraman for ABC 7 News. Five days a week, he’s out on the streets of downtown Chicago, chasing down the story with a reporter or two in his ABC van. He has done this day in and day out for over 30 years.

Growing up, my parents always included me in the conversation. They’d give me little history and vocabulary lessons to bring me up to speed on whatever the subject of the moment happened to be. Both parents were always more than happy to answer my endless questions of “why?”

This yearning for questioning and trying to stump people developed over the years, and my interests pulled me towards technology. While chatting with the professor in charge of the engineering club at my college, I brought up one of my latest questions I was yet to find a satisfactory answer to:

What do we do about all the jobs lost due to automation? What will happen as work becomes increasingly impossible to find because machines are simply better and cheaper than humans, barring no careers?

“I don’t know” was his answer. That struck me. It was one thing to listen to fellow classmates give me their half informed opinions on how they imagine the terminator will play out in real life. It was another thing entirely to discover that the chair of the engineering, math, and physical sciences department at my college didn’t have even a bad answer for what will happen to the millions of workers who will be displaced. He simply had no answer whatsoever, and instead Said “Maybe that’s something you should try to figure out.”

Understanding this topic’s individual elements is easy enough, but there are some dots that need connecting on a global scale. Perhaps even a cosmic scale.

The true value of the mind is its potential. Us humans use tools to help unlock and amplify this potential. Our technologies, economies, philosophies, and policies are deeply intertwined in the answer to the question –

To what extent will machines be capable of replacing human jobs in our lifetime?

What percent of jobs will be lost to machines? What exactly is preventing 100% automation? Perhaps most importantly, exactly when and how will this happen?

This constellation of ideas gives birth to a brand new conversation we all need to participate in for our own good:

The Technical Conversation: What is the upper limit of AI competency? Consider how a car is a mechanical tool to replace human legs. A car is not only close to the speed of a human. A car is not just on par with humans, or even a little faster. Cars are superhuman runners. Calculators are not about as good as you at math. They’re not about as good as your professor either. Your calculator is perfect. Extrapolating from this, encountering a digital intelligence would be a completely unprecedented experience. A true alien encounter.

The cars and calculators thought experiment is a good introduction to the concept of Accelerating Returns in computing. Understanding Moore’s Law is imperative to this. Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, the leading semiconductor manufacture, noticed that the number of transistors that fit on a square inch of computer board doubles approximately every 18 months, while the price remained the same. American Inventor Ray Kurzweil observed this trend of exponential advancement in the cost and efficiency of computation to be an inherent quality of nature. This trend did not begin with the integrated circuit. You can trace the story of exponential growth of computing power back through transistors, vacuum tubes, relays, even the electromechanical computers used in World War II fall into this trend. Even the technological advancement of the genetic complexity of RNA evolving into DNA falls into this trend known as The Law of Accelerating Returns. Kurzweil documents this phenomenon in his book The Singularity is Near, 2005. There has not even begun to be a discussion about all the implications this has.

The Economic Conversation: What if we have surplus resources? The transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic Age marks one of the most significant turning points in history. It was then that we went from the cold, naked things we were, running about in a state of nature, collecting berries and hunting game with sharp sticks, to farmers. Having a walled garden allowed us to have a little extra food on hand, which gave us some free time to enjoy life and invent things. And so farmers were born. With our efforts properly oriented towards optimizing the resource-allocation-tools of primitive farming, we were able to create all of human culture.

The philosophical critique of socialism is that there is no surplus work. The conversation changes when artificial super intelligence enters the game. Artificial intelligence will provide the surplus workforce. The transition that we saw from the Paleolithic Age to the Neolithic Age will pale in comparison to the new industrial revolution we are undergoing now.

The First Industrial Revolution took place around 1760 with the advent of the steam engine. This drove agriculture and textile manufacturing. On October 1st, 1908, the first Ford Model T drove off the lot. The Second Industrial Revolution was in full swing. Planes, trains, and automobiles were becoming more common place. Then, the Apple Computer 1, or simply Apple 1, debuting in April 1976, was the first personal computer ever sold. Designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs recognized the value of the personal computer as a powerful tool for the masses and jumped at the opportunity to capitalize it. Which brings us to the end of the Third Industrial Revolution.

Looking back at these past revolutions, notice how they were predominantly mechanical systems. Going into the 21st century, we are using intelligent systems to replace our brainwork, just as we had used mechanical systems to replace our legwork.

Notice, too, another pattern more sinister. “The Luddites were a secret oath-based organization of English textile workers in the 19th century, a radical faction which destroyed textile machinery as a form of protest…attacks occurred nightly at first, then sporadically, and then in waves, eventually spreading across a 70-mile swath of northern England from Loughborough in the south to Wakefield in the north. Fearing a national movement, the government soon positioned thousands of soldiers to defend factories. Parliament passed a measure to make machine-breaking a capital offense” (The Smithsonian Institution).

If past is prologue, then we are about to see an event of civil unrest sparked by the subversion of the global economy as a product of mass adoption of artificial intelligence into the marketplace that would make the 70-mile violent and destructive riots of The Luddites look like a pub crawl.

Digital minds buy and sell stocks on the international market daily. Elon Musk announced the governmental verification for fully autonomous self-driving cars would be taking place mid 2020. This means you could download the Tesla app, just like Uber, and summon a RoboTaxi, for a fraction of the cost of an Uber. Which means awkward Uber rides will soon be a meme of the past.

“Real-sounding but made-up news articles have become much easier to produce thanks to a handful of new tools powered by artificial intelligence — raising concerns about potential misuse of the technology” reports Asa Fitch of the Wall Street Journal in her article “Readers Beware: AI Has Learned to Create Fake News Stories” (October 13th, 2019).

Even an activity as complex, creative, and as human as journalism is, even that not out of reach of artificially constructed minds anymore. To assume that artificial intelligence will reach a limit, that we may never trigger the tripwire of infinite recursive self improvement is to err. Not because there is hard evidence for why we will achieve digital superintelligence (though The Law of Accelerating Returns leading to a ASI suggests itself as evidence), but because if we assume super intelligence is a problem for generations down the line, we may find ourselves blindsided by its implications.

It is the same logic that got us where we are as a species climatologically. The floating trash islands, oil spills, the uncomfortable ubiquity of micro plastics, the infernos that roar across California and the Amazon, the projected global temperature increase of 1.5+ ºC, and a laundry list of other concerns evidence the idea that we are a retroactive species, not a proactive one. “Taken as a whole, the range of published evidence indicates that the net damage costs of climate change are likely to be significant and to increase over time” (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, NASA).

If this is how we handle a little carbon dioxide, how will we cope with superintelligence displacing 99% of the workforce?

Just as our physical environment was not kept in mind as the bull of modern industrialism charged forth, so too are we ignorant of the shift of the tectonics of our macroeconomy as the digital minds of the future permeate our markets with increasing speed and competency, barring no fields.

With our shift from the Paleolithic Age to the Neolithic Age, we had a little extra food and time on our hands. With our efforts properly oriented towards optimizing the resource-allocation-tools of primitive farming, we were able to create all of human culture. The resource-allocation-tools of the future will be intelligent, self monitoring, and self improving. An automated vertical hydroponics farming mechanism powered by solar energy creating a surplus of food for the entire species is not a technological impossibility in 2019. Then there is the question: “why should we work to earn money to buy food if all the food grows for free on the trees of automation?” which inevitably leads to a snake pit ofpolitical discourse.

This fourth revolution of digital intelligence will change human history on a scale that would make the transition from the Paleolithic Age to the Neolithic age seems like an unnecessary footnote. We would not simply have a little extra food and time on our hands to make poetry and art. We would have a lot of time and a lot of resources on our hands to make whatever we wanted. Hyper realistic 3D virtual environments where billions of people can interact would be our new and preferred platform of communication. The Oculus Rift gives us a peek into what that world might look like going into the decade ahead.

This new industrial revolution is a chance for us humans to reinvent what value is. If hyper intelligent digital minds embedded in the Internet of Things are managing all the bodily functions of civilization, that would leave us to be hyper-intelligent cyborgian philosopher artists, with nothing to do but create and determine the fate of the universe. This prospect typically makes people uncomfortable. With no work, we suddenly find ourselves lost somehow. Yet if you asked a random stranger on the street, they will not tell you that their minimum wage job was the meaning of their life. In fact, they might report not enjoying the grind of their low paying job at all, much less find it to be a revelatory, transcendental experience. Let the digital markets and employee-less Amazon grocery stores and automated farms and industrial rumbas manage themselves. We should be exploring reality instead of being cooped up in cubicles all day. But what would a world like that look like?

The Philosophical Conversation: — If your minimum wage job is not the meaning of your life, what is? Some of the earliest forms of life were microorganisms with primitive photo-receptive cells that could do little more than determine light from dark. With their flagellum they’d flap around, avoiding the darkness of the depths, striving towards the light for photosynthesis. The concept of being oriented in one place, and going forward towards some valuable goal is a necessary psychological experience for a regulated psyche. Without a goal of striving for the light like the little cell that could, we are aimless. The fear of 100% job loss due to automation is the imposing question of meaning. However, we ought to recognize that we have been able to successfully graduate our interests from swimming to the surface of the primordial soup, avoiding darkness and reaching for the light, to developing hyper realistic 3D virtual reality games with millions of players simultaneously engaged. We will find something to busy ourselves with, we just literally cannot imagine it yet. A caveman would have no concept of being a web developer. So, too, will the humans of 2019 not understand the leaps and bounds of what the unfolding morphology of the exponential advancement of the digital mind has in store for us. The advent of Neuralinks N1 sensor is most likely the catalyst that will trigger the tripwire of artificial narrow or general intelligence being accelerated into superintelligence. Here’s an idea for the meaning of our lives: We could all use our newly acquired super intelligent minds to invent a way to redistribute enough wealth so that no one has to die needlessly for reasons like exposure, poor nutrition, or a lack of medical care.

This subject needs intense global discourse to address the question of what the meaning of our lives should be if not our careers. This will be explored more in the coming videos and articles.

The Political Conversation: Who has the power? Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerburg, Chairman Xi Jinping, President Donald Trump, President Vladimir Putin, multinational corporations, and well organized high profile crime syndicates. These are the easy answers to the question of who has the power. The harder answer to grapple with is that you have the power. Mark Zuckerberg was just some pimply kid in a dorm with a laptop. He just happened to be a genius, too. He was able to use the power of technology to become the youngest billionaire ever, just by making one measly website at the right time. Zuckerberg and Musk are both self-made billionaires thanks to the internet and the commodification of software. Musk made his initial fortune of $165 million by selling PayPal. This goes to show that real answer the question “who has the power?” is the people with the hearts and minds brave enough to contend with the fierce, ego corroding journey that is learning to write a computer program. Taking an idea and building a monument out of it in computer language is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the seas.

Day in and day out for over 30 years, my dad has hunted down the story of the day on the streets of downtown Chicago. I am my father’s son. I too shall hunt down the progress of this story and try to make sense of it. ~