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We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilize them.
Massive copying is here to stay. Massive tracking and total surveillance is here to stay. Ownership is shifting away. Virtual reality is becoming real. We can’t stop artificial intelligences and robots from improving, creating new businesses, and taking our current jobs.
In the intangible digital realm, nothing is static or fixed. Everything is becoming.
Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, and then Beginning.
A utopia has no problems to solve, but therefore no opportunities either.
In a sense, greed cures anarchy. Real dystopias are more like the old Soviet Union rather than Mad Max: They are stiflingly bureaucratic rather than lawless.
Protopia is a state of becoming, rather than a destination. It is a process. In the protopian mode, things are better today than they were yesterday, although only a little better.
So, the truth: Right now, today, in 2016 is the best time to start up. There has never been a better day in the whole history of the world to invent something.
Private investment in the AI sector has been expanding 70 percent a year on average for the past four years, a rate that is expected to continue.
This common utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need. You’ll simply plug into the grid and get AI as if it was electricity. It will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century past.
In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. Find something that can be made better by adding online smartness to it.
Cloud computing empowers the law of increasing returns, sometimes called the network effect, which holds that the value of a network increases much faster as it grows bigger. The bigger the network, the more attractive it is to new users, which makes it even bigger and thus more attractive, and so on. A cloud that serves AI will obey the same law. The more people who use an AI, the smarter it gets. The smarter it gets, the more people who use it. The more people who use it, the smarter it gets. And so on.
Our most premium AI services will likely be advertised as consciousness-free. Nonhuman intelligence is not a bug; it’s a feature. The most important thing to know about thinking machines is that they will think different.
Each step of surrender—we are not the only mind that can play chess, fly a plane, make music, or invent a mathematical law—will be painful and sad. We’ll spend the next three decades—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, continually asking ourselves what humans are good for.
In the grandest irony of all, the greatest benefit of an everyday, utilitarian AI will not be increased productivity or an economics of abundance or a new way of doing science—although all those will happen. The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.
To demand that artificial intelligence be humanlike is the same flawed logic as demanding that artificial flying be birdlike, with flapping wings. Robots, too, will think different.
“Right now we think of manufacturing as happening in China. But as manufacturing costs sink because of robots, the costs of transportation become a far greater factor than the cost of production. Nearby will be cheap. So we’ll get this network of locally franchised factories, where most things will be made within five miles of where they are needed.”
Everyone will have access to a personal robot, but simply owning one will not guarantee success. Rather, success will go to those who best optimize the process of working with bots and machines.
It’s human-robot symbiosis. Our human assignment will be to keep making jobs for robots—and that is a task that will never be finished. So we will always have at least that one “job.”
Seven Stages of Robot Replacement:
This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.
It is inevitable. Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters.
Our cycle time jumped from batch mode to daily mode. This was a big deal. The expectation shifted so fast, many institutions were caught off guard.
Now in the third age, we’ve moved from daily mode to real time. If we message someone, we expect them to reply instantly. If we spend money, we expect the balance in our account to adjust in real time.
1) It must be extremely easy to do; 2) The amount must be reasonable; 3) There’s clear benefit to them for paying; and 4) It’s clear the money will directly benefit the creators.
Tractors will become fast computers outfitted with treads, land will become a substrate for a network of sensors, and medicines will become molecular information capsules flowing from patient to doctor and back.
Commentators had long held that no one would want to read a book on a tiny few-inch-wide glowing screen, but they were wrong. By miles. I and many others happily read books that way.
For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes, and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that keeps receding further into the infinite future.
Brewster Kahle, an archivist who is backing up the entire internet, says that the universal library is now within reach.
“Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.
Every year I own less of what I use. Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever. Pretend you live inside the world’s largest rental store.
In Silicon Valley they say it like this: “Software eats everything.”
by 2025 the bandwidth to a high-end driverless car will exceed the bandwidth into your home.
Now that most people are equipped with a supercomputer in their pocket, entirely new economic forces are being unleashed.
The web is hyperlinked documents; the cloud is hyperlinked data.
In the coming 30 years the tendency toward the dematerialized, the decentralized, the simultaneous, the platform enabled, and the cloud will continue unabated.
The digital age is the age of non-bestsellers—the underappreciated, the forgotten. Because of sharing technologies, the most obscure interest is no longer obscure; it is one click away.
The largest, fastest growing, most profitable companies in 2050 will be companies that will have figured out how to harness aspects of sharing that are invisible and unappreciated today.
I work as an engineer in a co-op with other engineers from around the world. Our group is collectively owned and managed not by investors, nor by stockholders, but by 1,200 engineers.
Every 12 months we produce 8 million new songs, 2 million new books, 16,000 new films, 30 billion blog posts, 182 billion tweets, 400,000 new products.
“What do you want?” the filters ask. “You can choose anything; what do you choose?” The filters have been watching us for years; they anticipate what we will ask. They can almost autocomplete it right now.
Of course, the major funder of consumer VR development today is the game industry. But VR is much bigger than this.
The second generation of VR technology relies on a new, innovative “light field” projection. (The first commercial light field units are the HoloLens made by Microsoft and Magic Leap funded by Google.) In this design the VR is projected onto a semi-transparent visor much like a holograph.
As we watch the screen, the screen is watching us, where we look, and how we react.
We are equipping our devices with senses—eyes, ears, motion—so that we can interact with them. They will not only know we are there, they will know who is there and whether that person is in a good mood.
We think technology has saturated our private space, but we will look back in 20 years and realize it was still far away in 2016.
The first technological platform to disrupt a society within the lifespan of a human individual was personal computers. Mobile phones were the second platform, and they revolutionized everything in only a few decades. The next disrupting platform—now arriving—is VR. Here is how a day plugged into
the long term this is the destiny of many of the constant streams of data flowing from our bodily sensors. They won’t be numbers; they will be new senses.
lifestream. First described by the computer scientist David Gelernter in 1999, a lifestream is more than just a data archive.
You can go back in time or go to the future and see what you’re supposed to be doing next week or next decade. Your entire cyberlife is right there in front of you.
