This is going to be my first post about my futuristic view, aggregated from different ideas in the scene, for AI, Humanity and different aspects of Life on earth. And it is mostly the introduction to the fundamental beliefs in the following parts, I will dig into one aspect of our life each time, e.g. How Education/Healthcare/Housing will look in 50 to 200 years from now.
I was with my friends at Lia and we went to have dinner after party with all accelerator members. The event that triggered me to write my thoughts, was the dinner table in which I discussed my view on AI, roots, future while talking to Ula, co-founder of Lia. After that, the inspiration continued when I was attending EIT Digital 2017 conference.
Last week, when I was attending XLDay - the demo day of High Tech XL -, a Wearable-focused accelerator in Eindhoven. There were lots of great hardware startups from:
- Sensors which protect us from the sun,
- AI voice assistant for blinds’ movement,
- Posture fixing gadget — Lia,
- Artificial stone out of PET,
- Connected horses, another one with connected boats and a lot more cool stuff.
The talk began with a discussion between Ula and her sister Fidan, who is also a co-founder in Lia, about whether the horrible robotic future is possible and Ula answered that no, there is no way, it’s much far than it can be real. I agree with her and I continued to talk about where the AI can end-up. Although we discussed period of times in random, not in the chronological order but here I will put them in the order so it would be easier to understand. The goal of such an idealized version of future is just to see the possibilities and upcoming trends and work towards them to achieve them.
So, I have a dream that:
Connecting and Robotization Wave: IFTTT of things
I will start this with a quote from Henry Tirri, ex-CTO of Nokia, about current situation:
Bits eat atoms, Everyday.
First, let’s go for really near future, ranging from 15 to 40 years from now, the connected everything era. Beside the new possibilities it gives and hidden information it reveals through data, it is one of the last steps to let’s say robotize the jobs. If everything you can imagine, from cars in the street to the home appliance in the kitchen get connected, then they can be programmed to do whatever they are supposed to do. E.g. drive you home while your dinner is getting cooked at the home with the ingredients brought to you by drones who know what you dish will have and whether you have ingredients or not.
As we tend to write programs that are optimize something, AI and robotics are not an exception. We will have a lighter traffic flow, fewer injuries, more time to live, … by all of this h2m connection.
I hugely believe in the case that at some point in this period, driving cars will be illegal and most probably owning a car will be meaningless thanks to the upcoming trend of sharing economy. This sounds really awkward and it is in fact. Currently, car manufacturers are working on autonomous cars which in previous sentences I said would eliminate the cars and owning them. It is under question how much they will allow these scene to be advanced to make our scenario possible. The possible solution, in this case, is that they will be the taxi service company by themselves.
While above trend is taking place some important things are happening in the other industries as well. The continuation of job replacement by machines and (un)employment disaster from blue collar jobs to highly skilled professions like doctors and even surgeries or detecting cancers. This is the transition phase that made world’s top industrial leaders from Elon Musk to Pierre Omidyar to think about Basic income concept. Omidyar foundation currently is doing a pilot program in Kenya.
This is the phase that I am really passionate about all these computerizing our dumb tasks like driving, cooking, … (not all the times but if we do it every day for 60 years), because we are creative social machines and currently, we cannot use our full productivity. The whole human is summarized in this 2 words: Creative and Social, we need to use our brain power to feel satisfied and to Love and feel loved. These are the aspects we need to improve, not a car which goes 0–60 in 0.001s faster to its competitors in the same price range or another dating app, a mobile phone with higher CPU hertz, … The ideal future is that people can work on whatever they like and talented at while enjoying the company of their beloved ones. Let me explain how this gonna happen, maybe in 100–200 years but that’s the trend.
Welcome CoC!
That basic income and automating every task and job will result in what I call Collapse of the Capitalism (CoC). After the 2nd industrial revolution and large-scale production, we entered the last phase of the capitalism. It tends to optimize every cent of the money it can by improving machines, optimizing workforce, culture, … which gave us what we have now, from airplanes to modern computers and VR glasses. However, this optimization is going to be self-killer by replacing ALL the jobs and then there will be no one who can afford the high-end products and then there will be no revenue!
Because we got into the somehow end of the current period of technological development where we are just inventing more and more advertising tricks in contrast to the lots of life changing events happened in the 20th century. He who has the best marketing budget and strategy is going to win in the current situation.
Let’s take wearables, apart from smart-watches and smart-glasses. How many of you are wearing any wearable? For me and people around me, young people with the highest adoption rate it is 0.
The thing about CoC may be seen as a negative thing. And of course they (capitalists) will try to prevent it and to some extent, they will be able to delay the process. But humans are so bad at falsifying the truth. Whether it took decades to accept that the earth is rounded or not, Sun will not always be behind the clouds. Actually, it will follow by making governments more robotic. IF computer can do stuff from optimizing the flow of traffic and deciding better financial decisions(but most probably there will other Valuable decisions than monetary ones), … why not to fully govern the country? Most of the things a government is doing can be replaced, e.g. Transportation, healthcare, education, …
But the important point here is that I don’t think we will totally remove Capitalism, but we will introduce a different system which will of ocurse have some common features as our current models but totally adopted to the lifestyle of the future.
What the hell we will be doing then?
So by assuming at the end, CoC will really happen, then what’s next? what system will replace it to make a framework for us to understand each other and build our life based on?
The short answer is Love.
The full answer of how does it make sense is:
By following events above we would reach a point where most of the machines are doing all dumb tasks. There is no money left to earn. The only thing we need to keep this process sustainable is to provide “Free energy” to the machines so they can continue to do their job while we are Loving and Living (LL) every moment. And you know what I mean, by then the efficiency of Natural energy sources will reach the required point so that we can get it.
But what exactly people will do?
If you have free power, autonomous cars, and robots to build those cars from free resources (from Nanotechnology material to the Energy resource) you will enjoy riding and traveling around the world, being with your loved ones all the time and having a meal with them which is in the worse case it is a robot well-cooked meal with robot-grown ingredients in a robot built house/restaurant for (almost) free. Wall-E scene yeah? If you born as a human, you have the right to Live and to Love freely, to Think and Socialize, without concerning how many more hours you should work to pay your rent or, etc.
It sounds good but it really seems too far from now. Removing a word as important as Money which most of the people are thinking is the ultimate motivation for everything we do now is really hard. That’s why it will be a new phase of our life on earth.
Finally, I invite you to watch this video from World Economic Forum about Industrial 4.0
In the next part, I will write about Elon Musk’s latest adventure, Neuralink, and it’s impact on our lives. Also we’ll dig the concept of the philosophical Purpose of the life of humanity and satisfaction it needs. More exactly we’ll answer Musk’s concern about what will replace the satisfaction people get from their jobs at the moment. He talked about this on WGS 2017.
Share your thoughts below and keep tuned for the upcoming parts about Future Life in details.
