I was very struck today, as I whizzed through the countryside in a Newcastle-bound train, by the number of south-facing roofs bearing solar panels. I wonder how long it will be before we start detecting a difference in value depending on the orientation of houses. And how long before new builds start to align like iron filings driven my the magnetism of market forces.
Category Archives: Society
The era of emulation and what it means for us
What is the next phase for humanity? Robin Hanson set out to answer this question in a thought-provoking and lively talk to London Futurists on March 19th.
He argues that humanity has been through several distinct economic growth phases each of which has been “exponential” in character. The first lasted nearly 200,000 years from the moment Homo Sapiens first emerged as hunter-gatherers. These early humans were vastly superior to the animals they replaced, successfully exploiting their environment through the use of organisation and tools. The next economic era began with the arrival of agriculture about 10,000 years ago and brought about a huge acceleration in development, with efficient use of labour and larger and more sophisticated societies. This ended with the birth of the third era, the industrial era, which started around 1760. Again, an exponential increase in economic output and efficiency. This gave way to the computer age in which we currently are. The exponential periods of these eras has been becoming shorter and shorter with world GDP doubling roughly every 15 to 20 years today.
What, Hanson asked, could create an economy which doubles every week or month?
And the answer he comes up with is – robots.
What Hanson means by “robots” is true general artificial intelligence and he argues there are three ways to do this: better software, a comprehensive theory of intelligence, or emulating a human brain.
And it is his belief that the most likely scenario is that we will first develop the capacity to emulate a human brain and that this should happen “sometime in the next century”.
All we need, he argues, are “many parallel computers” which are capable of scanning a human brain, modelling every brain cell type and recording what we see and then “running the model”.
This doesn’t mean we need to understand how a brain works – he thinks we may be centuries away from this. But we would be able to run what he calls “EMs” – short for emulations.
If we had them there would be a new age – the age of EM.
It is this new era, then, that he sets out to describe. Running in software, EMs are effectively immortal -“like houses and cars, if we choose”. But it’s unlikely EMs will choose to be – much more likely that they will spawn short-lived versions of themselves to carry out repetitive or one-off tasks and then shut these down when they have served their purpose.
The new age will have new morals – EMs will probably be OK with termination and respooling.
Partly this is simply a result of obsolescence – “Currently if the economy doubles every 15 years your skills as an individual become obsolete in that time.” This is why we retire and let the next generation learn the next set of skills. “In the world of the EM faster emulation means faster obsolescence.”
They will run faster because, even though these new consciouses are essentially human brains, “human brains are parallel so more hardware means more speed.” And they will take up very little space as they only really need to inhabit robot bodies when they need to do something in the physical instead of the virtual world. Hanson believes most of the time they will inhabit a purely virtual environment.
Hanson sees the birth of EMs as inevitable – they will be developed to speed economic development. And in the early days humans will own the EMs – much like slaves were owned. But just like slaves, some EMs will “buy” their freedom and from there they will quickly make up more and more of the economy (which may now be doubling in a matter of weeks or days). Because they are so cheap to create (an EM could be copied millions of times at very little cost) and because they cost so little to run he says wages will effectively fall to way below human subsistence wages.
Humans will be eclipsed. The whole human race will retire.
Whether that retirement is a happy or a tragic one is very much up to us, he believes, as we will be quite rich enough as a whole to ensure a good outcome, although those riches will be extremely unequally distributed.
But either way, we might be retiring into a very different world. “Robots don’t need nature” he says. “They may choose to save nature but don’t need to.”
And if we are thinking all this doesn’t sound too good, and that we humans are bound to resist, he doesn’t really buy the “robot wars” scenario, either. “There wasn’t a farmer-industry war during the switch to the industrial era.”
So if this new era could begin soon, how long will it last? Hanson believes that because EMs will be running so fast the whole era could last just a couple of years. After that, maybe they will develop true software AI which will spawn the next era – who knows….
Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University.
Network Society: the coming socio-economic phase transformation
The world is headed for a big transition, says David Orban, entrepreneur and Singularity University faculty member, speaking at a London Futurists lecture in London on February 6th.
“Technology created humans,” he says. “And we continue to use reason to advance technology for humanity’s benefit.” But the key to the future wellbeing of society lies in practicing open science and having an open society, he says.
Historically we are always “shackled to moral norms by limitations of technology” he says. For example we had child labour because our technology wasn’t good enough to run industrial revolution mills without them. We had slavery because our agricultural and engineering techniques were running behind our economic development.
Now we destroy the environment because it is deemed necessary in order for economies to grow and citizens to consume. Once these ills become untenable, necessity drives alternatives, he says.
Widespread social and cultural change only happens once a robust technology platform underpins them
The networked exponential technologies which are coming next are going to profoundly disrupt the Nation State, he argues.
Solar panels are a good example. When people put solar panels on their roofs they make lots of small decisions, each of which doesn’t cost much. When the State makes energy decision for the country it is done by one big, long term centralised project (think Hinkley Point). The opportunity to call the future wrong is vastly more in the second case than the former.
Another example is 3D printing. This can stop waste from centralised manufacturing getting it wrong but distributes power to the consumer.
And growing food hydroponically in the basement of apartment blocks, reduces waste by bringing food production close to the consumer, using exact quantities of nutrients and light and heat, and growing year-round.
And there are lots more examples, he says:
- Health sensors keeping people healthy
- MOOCs educating people wherever they are
- Crypto currencies reducing the cost of transactions and challenging the power of the banks
- Even Airbnb competing with security agencies through “a self-reinforcing reputation system which expels from the network if breached”
All such examples are inevitably portrayed as passing fads, he says, but they are in fact part of unstoppable trend.
In this environment exponential technologies lead to exponential uncertainties, he says. There is great value for those whose get it right.
The next trillion dollar companies are being born right now
What has to happen next, he argues, is for computers to be allowed to make decisions by themselves. The world is rapidly become too complex and fast-moving for humans to be the only decision-makers. The LHC, for example, throws away 99% of data itself because it knows it is of no value and the human scientists would become overwhelmed. “Self-driving cars need to make their own decisions.”
Dumb machines must lose and smart machines must win
The idea that it is essential for humans to have the last word was fatally undermined when Andreas Lubitz decided to deliberately fly Flight 9525 into a mountainside, he says. “Planes must be able to disobey and save their passengers.”
But for computers to make decision we need to make them moral. We have a “cosmic responsibility to adapt and face our challenges” he says. We need a global network of ideas which can evolve scaleable solutions. First there will be a science of morality then we will need to engineer morality into our machines. It is, he says, inevitable.
The promise of the fully networked society is great, but the outcome isn’t a given. “It is up to us whether this phase transition will be peaceful or not”, he says. The current levels of inequality will be just the start unless we meet the challenge to change society so that everyone can enjoy the coming benefits. “We cannot continue vilify the unemployed as we do now,” he says, because in the future we all will be unemployed.
David Orban is an entrepreneur, a member of the Faculty of, and Advisor to the Singularity University, and the Founder of Network Society Research, a London based global non-profit.
Reinventing society
Veteran management guru Charles Handy has been thinking about curves. He told a packed session at the RSA today that everything moves through curves which go up before declining.
The tricky thing is that “you have to start the second curve before you reach the top of the one you are on.” As he puts it: “The status quo is the enemy of the second curve.”
He said he had been struck by the observation that so much of what we do today seems to have been designed for a world that has passed. “So I thought I would look at other aspects of society.”
In his book Second Curve he looks at many aspects of modern society through the lens of first and second curves. And sometimes second curves are not an improvement.
Take business for instance. He says the purpose of a business used to be quite clear – it was to acquire customers. That changed with the arrival of the Chicago School of economists headed by Milton Freedman who challenged this by asserting that the shareholders were key. Subsequently the point of the firm became to make the shareholders rich. In order to do this effectively an incentive in the form of share options was provided. “So managers decided to increase the share price which isn’t too hard to do, by cutting investment for example.”
Capitalism is broken and its Milton Freedman’s fault.
He points to the current craze for share buybacks as the logical conclusion of this. This, though, bleeds the corporations of investment capital. “Thus was a disastrous second curve.”
Curves don’t hurt apply to corporations. “What is the invidual’s second curve?” He asks. The answer he says is his “portfolio lifestyle” – Redefine what a job is, he urges and work for customers not employers.
The education system gets a workout, too. “Look at our education system,” he says. “It’s bizarre.”
Emotional intelligence is what we need for the world we are moving into he says, so we should rejig our education system, make the leaving age 14 and then have tailored apprenticeships for the next four years.
What about the welfare state? Redesign it along Singaporean lines he says. In Singapore all citizens have a Provident Fund which provides for unemployment support, healthcare and retirement. Because both the individual and the company pay in, it is seen as an investment instead of tax, he says.
What is the second curve for politics someone asked from the floor.
He didn’t answer directly but did point out a weakness with the current British system. We have developed a political class he says because you have to be an MP to be a minister. Most other countries don’t insist on this and as a result their talent pool for recruitment is much much larger.
In his book he says he is “throwing out ideas to provoke not prescribe.” On that level it seems to work. But in other respects observations on some areas seem dated. Take his thought on education and the welfare state. These are based on the notion that gainful work will be available to all. That notion is now being powerfully questioned.