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Once we add a new kind of intelligence into this method, science will have to know, and progress, according to the criteria of new minds. At that point everything changes.
Humans are for inventing new kinds of intelligences that biology could not evolve.
make machines that think different—to create alien intelligences. We should really call AIs “AAs,” for “artificial aliens.”
As we invent more species of AI, we will be forced to surrender more of what is supposedly unique about humans. 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.
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.
By 2050 most truck drivers won’t be human. Since truck driving is currently the most common occupation in the U.S., this is a big deal.
Google’s translation AI turns a phone into a personal translator.
The only reason to buy handmade cloth today is because you want the imperfections humans introduce.
Jobs Humans Can’t Do but Robots Can
Every time you click on the search button you are employing a robot to do something we as a species are unable to do alone.
Jobs We Didn’t Know We Wanted Done
We can today remove a tumor in our gut through our navel, make a talking-picture video of our wedding, drive a cart on Mars, print a pattern on fabric that a friend mailed
We are doing, and are sometimes paid for doing, a million new activities that would have dazzled and shocked the farmers of 1800.
every day peasant farmers in China without plumbing purchase smartphones.
In a very real way our inventions assign us our jobs.
The one thing humans can do that robots can’t (at least for a long while) is to decide what it is that humans want to
each person’s task (in part) will be to invent new things to do that will later become repetitive jobs for the robots.
success will go to those who best optimize the process of working with bots and machines.
Geographical clusters of production will matter, not for any differential in labor costs but because of the differential in human expertise.
Our human assignment will be to keep making jobs for robots—and that is a task that will never be finished. So we will al...
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This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines.
based on how well you work with robots.
The internet is the world’s largest copy machine.
cycle through memory, cache, server, routers, and back.
Once a copy has touched the internet, it never leaves.
Our civilization’s previous economy was built upon warehouses of fixed goods and factories stockpiled with solid cargo. These physical stocks are still necessary, but they are no longer sufficient for wealth and happiness. Our attention has moved away from stocks of solid goods to flows of intangibles, like copies. We value not only the atoms in a thing, but their immaterial arrangement and design and, even more, their ability to adapt and flow in response to our needs. Formerly solid products
Your solid car parked in a driveway has been transformed into a personal on-demand transportation service supplied by Uber, Lyft, Zip, and Sidecar—which are improving faster than automobiles are. Grocery shopping is no longer a hit-or-miss affair; now a steady flow of household replenishables streams into our homes uninterrupted.
rivers of uninterrupted betterment.
We are currently entering the third phase of computing, the Flows.
As Marshall McLuhan observed, the first version of a new medium imitates the medium it replaces.
Today the prime units are flows and streams.
Tags have replaced links. We tag and “like” and “favorite” moments in the streams.
Some streams, like Snapchat, WeChat, and WhatsApp, operate totally in the present, with no past or future.
Now in the third age, we’ve moved from daily mode to real time.
The corollary—and this is important—is that in order to operate in real time, everything has to flow.
we’d rather watch a lesser show in real time than wait two days for something better on a DVD.
I purchase a book ahead of time, it just sits in the same place that a book I have not bought sits (in the cloud) but in the paid bucket instead of the unpaid bucket. Why not just leave it in the unpaid bucket?
I don’t purchase a book until I am ready to read it in the next 30 seconds.
just-in-time purchasing is the natural consequence of re...
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They need to do their utmost to interact in real time. Real time is human time.
So in order to run in real time, our technological infrastructure needed to liquefy. Nouns needed to be verbs. Fixed solid things became services.
Everything had to flow into the stream of now.
The foundational units of this third digital regime, then, are flows, tags, and clouds.
The first industry to be steamrolled by the switch to real time and the cloud of copies was music. Perhaps because music itself is so flowing—a stream of notes whose beauty lasts only as long as the stream continues—it was the first to undergo liquidity.
the same transformation from fixities to flows began to overturn shopping, transportation, and education. This inevitable shift toward fluidity is now transforming almost every other aspect of society. The saga of music’s upgrade to the realm of fluidity will reveal where we are headed.
Now the axis of value has flipped again. Rivers of free copies have undermined the established order. In this new supersaturated digital universe of infinite free digital duplication, copies are so ubiquitous, so cheap—free, in fact—that the only things truly valuable are those that cannot be copied.
superabundant, they become worthless. Instead, stuff that can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
You can’t simply duplicate someone’s else’s trust. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). Since we prefer to deal with
someone we can trust, we will often pay a premium for that privilege. We call that branding.
