Navigating the Future
The first thing that has to be talked about with AI is ethical responsibility. Most people do not have proper ethics. It’s time to learn. Check out UNESCO IBM Wikipedia and Google for this.
There is currently a scarcity mindset that exists on planet Earth. We only have so many fossil fuels (surely they will someday run out); however we are probably no-where near that point (feel free to disagree in the forum). It is also extremely likely that we will invent carbon sinks (natural and machine..perhaps both?!?) in the new few decades, which could reverse the existing effects. We could also very carefully terraform our planet to support the largest amount of biodiversity that Earth has ever seen; which is what I would encourage.
However, this approach is very biased. It assumes that the greenhouse gas effect is irreversible, for which there is no supporting data. In fact, the existing data suggest that planet Earth has gone through many phases of extinction to get to where we are right now. It also assumes that the greenhouse gas effect is a negative thing for the planet, which also might not be true… we simply do not have enough data to know such things. And it is true that the Earth goes through phases in alignment with the life on the planet at the time (take the massive plankton extinction that nearly wiped all life off of planet Earth 250 million years ago, for instance).
I have no doubt that the old growth forests in the world, as well as the existing endangered species on Earth will be thoroughly protected in the future. We are guardians of the natural world; it is our birthright to transform this planet into a Utopia. The primary opposition to this is internal to humanity; greed and ignorance.
So with that said, let’s assume that we are all biased and that very shortly here, we are going to get to a point where we can learn about our biases and become more efficient at learning. At this point, we will start to run out of electricity. The reasoning is that we are all competing to make the coolest art, or mine bitcoin to create more crypto money, or conquer the planet with AI at the cost of mucho energies.
So we start getting into ethical use cases and most of this surrounds using electricity. The question becomes, how efficient are you with your energy consumption? Do you turn everything off when you sleep? Regulating this becomes a big deal, especially when the wealthy will compete with the poor for the resource.
We also have to deal with the fact that most people will use AI in a predatory way; mostly in advertising and politics; both of which are obviously corruptible. Also intelligent cheating and rates of fraud will rise drastically over the next decade. It is going to be more important than ever for us humans to learn to be honest and also to trust each other and also maintain a healthy degree of skepticism for the future.
The Continued Problem of Electricity
Charts FTW
This is an awesome look at how the world produces Carbon (which, by the way, is the primary fuel of plants on our planet). You can see that there are several countries using large amounts of carbon, even more than the United States.
Here is a separate chart on the use of energy by source:
So we have a very dirty economy of oil and coal that has not yet been properly supplemented by solar energy, which is, in my opinion, the way to produce the cleanest energy on planet Earth. We could literally throw a space station full of batteries into orbit and just shuttle the giant batteries back and forth between orbit and the planet’s surface to allow them to recharge. Or we can mind asteroids and awaken age old alien species that have been dormant to protect the exploitation of energy in the universe /s
In the meantime, we need to focus on nuclear fission and creating enough energy to power the quantum processors that run AI. This leads us into our first post-energy crisis problem. Climate Change.
Lets Postulate that Climate Change is Misunderstood
Do you ever feel like science is really bad at predicting the weather? There are undoubtedly classified and non-public variables (international energy regulations and agreements) that we are dealing with; but if climate science was decently understood at all, we would be able to predict the weather with a bit of accuracy, which does not seem to be the case. As we spew energy into the atmosphere, the climate becomes more variable and unpredictable; however, the green house gas effect might actually have a net positive impact on plant and animal life on planet Earth.
Consider, for instance, the new evolutionary theories that have gained traction since Darwinism (which at this point, honestly, is a bit archaic, though Darwin was a genius). Pangenesis was Charles Darwin‘s hypothetical mechanism for heredity, in which he proposed that each part of the body continually emitted its own type of small organic particles called gemmules that aggregated in the gonads, contributing heritable information to the gametes.[1] This is originally from Hippocrates of Kos (/hɪˈpɒkrətiːz/; Greek: Ἱπποκράτης ὁ Κῷος, translit. Hippokrátēs ho Kôios; c. 460 – c. 370 BC), also known as Hippocrates II, was a Greek physician of the classical period who is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine.
A gamete (/ˈɡæmiːt/; from Ancient Greekγαμετή (gametḗ) ‘wife’, ultimately from Ancient Greekγάμος(gámos) ‘marriage’) is a haploid cell that fuses with another haploid cell during fertilization in organisms that reproduce sexually.[1] Gametes are an organism’s reproductive cells, also referred to as sex cells.[2]
Modern Synthesis is the model we should be using currently imho. Julian Huxley coined the term during World War II.
Here is the process:
Let’s say that life on Earth is evolving, somewhat quickly, which seems to be true if you are a naturalist looking at photos from around the world depicting animal behaviors (which includes humanity). The increased speed of the feedback loop would enable faster evolution over time, which means that the species on Earth will evolve more rapidly over time. This becomes a major problem for humanity; the animal species could, in theory, evolve beyond our capacity to defend ourselves from the primordial world. We have this nuanced competition for resources on the planet and eventually we will be competing with animals that have evolved beyond our ability to compete with them for resources. This could become an even bigger issue than climate change, especially in the near future, if humanity is able to survive the increased variability in the weather and planetary super-events (mud-slides, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, etc). Something to think about.
“The only problem we really have is we think we’re not supposed to have problems!” – some rich asshat
I love Google. Thank you for your work!
References:
- Royal Society on Evolutionary Synthesis
- Google HyperDisk
- UNESCO
- Wikipedia AI Ethics
- Google AI Principles
- Google Responsible AI
- Artphoria.ai
- Grok Log Parsing (still researching this)
- Futurism.com
- Google Secures America’s Banks amid A.I. Revolution
- Digiconomist
- ourworldindata.org
- Hippocrates
- Julian Huxley
- Zoonomia is recommended reading! (amazon copy here)