Reading Time: 6 minutes The wildest claims about AI—both the optimistic and the pessimistic ones—are unlikely to come true. However, the technology has genuine potential both to liberate humans from toil, or to allow greed and bias to run wild. The solutions we need aren’t sci-fi constructs like Asimov’s three laws, but better laws and policies to guide the technology down beneficial paths.
Futurity
Posted inTechnology
Our AI future: Don’t fear the Singularity
Reading Time: 6 minutes AI futurists assume that faster thinking automatically produces greater intelligence, leading to a Singularity of transcendent machine minds. However, thinking speed is the less important half of intelligence. We should remember the failure of past predictions and have some humility about what the future holds.
Posted inTechnology
Our AI future: heaven, hell, hype and hogwash
Reading Time: 7 minutes AI has demonstrated impressive talents, and new uses are being discovered every day. However, the existing AI programs are single-purpose. They aren’t the futurist dream of an artificial general intelligence that can solve any problem and rapidly improve itself. And there’s no telling how far off such a thing actually is.
Posted inThe Future
Longtermism: the good, the bad and the ridiculous
Reading Time: 6 minutes Planning for the future is wise and necessary. But some philosophers leave reason behind and stray into religious fantasy when they argue that a far-off utopian scenario supersedes any moral obligations to the present.
Posted inSocial Media
Twitter’s Elon Musk debacle raises serious questions about digital citizenship
Reading Time: 9 minutes On October 3, Elon Musk tweeted a proposal for “Ukraine-Russia Peace”, with a Yes/No poll that yielded 2.7 million responses (59 percent “No”). Because Musk is the richest person in the world, with a current net worth of around $230 billion USD from Tesla, SpaceX, and recent AI ventures, his views on Russia’s invasion of […]
Posted inTechnology
The end of the labor economy
Reading Time: 5 minutes The day is approaching when no human beings will have to work to supply the needs of life. We can liberate ourselves from lives of toil. But will we use the robot surplus wisely?
Posted inEvolution
The Silurian hypothesis: Are we the first intelligent species on Earth?
Reading Time: 4 minutes If humans weren’t the first intelligent species to evolve on this planet, would we know it?
Posted inPolitics
The middle of history
Reading Time: 5 minutes Why today’s utopian ideologies are unlikely to take us all the way to utopia.
Posted inPsychology
Against doomism
Reading Time: 4 minutes Doom-laden scenarios get the most attention, but slow, bumpy progress toward a better world has always been more likely.
Posted inTechnology
Climbing the Kardashev ladder: How civilization survives
Reading Time: 3 minutes The power to control ever-greater amounts of energy is a hallmark of civilization’s progress, and humanity is poised to take the next big step.