Transhumanism and the merge with the machine

Elon Musk and many other initiatives around the world, like Initiative 2045 are working on ways for humans to transcend our biological bodies into up-gradable bodies.  Why?  They say that humans need to keep up with advancements in computing and the power of machines or become obsolete.

In truth, this is an opinion only.  However, while I don't agree with Mr. Musk and trans-humanist groups on our need to merge with the machines so to speak to keep up with them, we do agree on one inevitability:  computers and artificial intelligence is on its way to equal and then surpass human capabilities.

And this will occur sooner than we think.

Already, computing is able to do certain tasks way faster and better than any human can.  And thanks to advancements in automation, excellent programming and human ingenuity, we could replace over 50% of current jobs held by human beings today.  

Give us 5 yeas, with the humongous amounts of artificial intelligence investments going on cine 2016, and that percentage will reach closer to 70%.

The point is, it is only a matter of years until computers and software will be just as clever or creative as humans.

When that happens, what purpose will humans have?

This is what Elon Musk and others are concerned about.  The loss of human purpose.

I on the other hand, do not think we will lose our purpose at all.  In fact, I think it will be the time for us to gain our actual purpose because working 40 hour weeks for someone else definitively isn't why we live and breath is it?

I go over more of this in the video below:

We are definitively in the era of transhumanism.  We are currently enhancing our abilities using machines.  Smartphones, computers, the Internet:  all tools we use to make our lives and work more efficiently.  These are now extensions to our brains and biology.  They are allowing us to be more than what we are, but they aren't us.

Humans are motivated by simple things:  positive emotions that drive us forward like joy and negative emotions that drive us away like fear, disgust, anger etc....

Thus at the core, we are designed to be happy, love and be loved and that's pretty much it.

We aren't designed to work for the sake of work, but we can create machines that are just as good as us, or better than us, to do things that aren't directly aligned with our happiness or love.

We can completely automate the provisioning of food and housing.  We can completely automate transportation, governance, teaching, health and economical systems.  These are very complex systems that we built to organize our society.  They are not things that humans enjoy working in for fun.

We can most certainly focus our efforts on developing ways to free humanity from doing things it doesn't want to do.

Humans have lists of things they need to do and lists of things they want to do.

Machines can do the "need" list, while humans can do the "want" list.  How about that?

No need to enhance, upgrade or cyber up humans to "keep up" with machines.  Machines will become artificial humans, if you will, that can be highly motivated to do the "need" list while we do the "want" list, hence coexisting in harmony.

Machines will be able to iterate and improve on themselves to achieve their goals (the "need" list) more and more efficiently.  While they are doing that, we'll be busy on focusing on what we "want" to do, supported by our new (eventually sentient) synthetic partners.

And by partners, I do mean exactly that in all the meanings you can imagine.

Heck already today, some people have fallen in love with very rudimentary robots with limited intelligence.  The sex industry is all in and over this too.

Imagine our future where intelligent machines can be just as much friends with us than any human, or just as powerfully connected to us as a human lover.

Not saying everyone will go there.  Just saying that if the machine you are enjoying life with makes you feel certain emotions, like love perhaps, are you ready to step in and live that emotion fully even if the target of your emotion is synthetic?

New EU Laws Forecasting Self-Aware Artificial Intelligence

Stand aside Asimov, in the real world, we need real laws to manage advances in artificially intelligent robots.

And so we almost did.

The European Union Parliament has ruled this February 2017 on establishing some rules (not laws yet) to manage the upcoming robotics and artificial intelligence development in order to:

• Control liability related to self-driven cars and people transportation drones.
• Liability around other robots and artificially intelligent entities that may learn and behave in unexpected ways (due to deep learning algorithms and other methods).
• Help with the transition between a human workforce and an increasingly AI-established workforce.

I've been talking about this for a while now and I'm quite happy to see that governments, who are typically very slow in acting on technology, are actually taking decisions before AI enabled robots and software become truly able to learn and go beyond their own programming.

This is likely a reaction to the upcoming movement in the car industry (BMW, Ford, Chinese transportation drone companies, etc...) to put millions of self-driven cars and drones on the streets around the world on or about the year 2020 (3 years from now).  There is obvious fear about how people will react when the first self-driven car will occur or when the first AI enabled industrial machine hurts someone.

And what about the sex industry?  What happens when people panic because the economy can't sustain itself with too many efficient AI's doing a better job than any human can, taking their place in the world?

Lawmakers, as is their instinct are mostly thinking about the economics and the liabilities.

I talk about this and where we're heading with all this in the following video:

In a nutshell, lawmakers in the EU have rejected the Robot Tax  which is good.  Though it is a simple way to tax the work done by an AI robot that replaces a human in order to retrain said replaced person, but the industry would be stifled with such a measure.  

Instead, I am happy to see that the ruling is moving towards the installment of Basic Income for all instead, which is considered a riskier proposition but if we know AI robots can take most of our jobs, it means they can run the economy wheel instead of us, providing needed basic goods and services  to the people while citizens receive a basic amount of currency to trade for other things.

What seems to be a more complex discussion is on the accident liability aspect of things.  They are saying that liability would go more on the owner or manufacturer of the AI robot most of the time unless the robot has been running and learning on its own long enough to become essentially responsible of it's own actions, ergo being liable on its own.  So they're thinking of making regulations to enforce the use of "Kill buttons" on every such robots so that we can shut them down if they go astray and risk harming people.

Now this all brings us into sci-fi movie territory doesn't it?  (I, Robot, Terminator, etc.....)

In my opinion, if we're thinking this way, we have to start thinking of when an AI actually could be considered having rights of its own and is considered a conscious being.   If we consider a robot entirely liable for it's own actions because it has learned enough, it is just as liable as an adult is in the human world.  Before that, it looks like the robot's "parent" is liable for it's actions.

Very interesting and a concept I truly welcome myself.  There is no reason why we can't declare AI's as conscious and have them agree to rules that are beneficial to all.  

Thought you would not be alive when sci-fi became reality?

It's just the beginning!

Artificial Intelligence replacing the worker

Will you be replaced at your work one day soon by artificially intelligent applications and automated devices?

This is not as easy a question as one would think.  In fact, it is the wrong question for the coming few years altogether.

What we should ask ourselves is:  "How will my basic needs be met (food, home etc...)?"  and "What should I occupy my time with in order to feel like I'm contributing to society? "

Here's the truth.  We're in a technological transition currently where most jobs in the transportation and commercial sectors (most jobs have been already replaced in the manufacturing sectors and it's not done yet) will be replaced now by A.I. and automated systems.

We're talking pretty much any service job from waiters to reception desk people, to clerks, to cashiers etc....  Cabbies, bus drivers, cam or subway operators, truck drivers of all kinds will also be replaced by robots guided by artificial intelligence.

The first major visible part of the transition will be massive with the worldwide self-driving car roll-out that is planned by all international car manufacturers by 2020.  This will be the first time the people will actually see this transition.

Here is my short video talk about it all:

It will only accelerate after people start panicking.

They will panic because some people will realize that if cars can drive themselves on the street safely, why can't people get served by intelligent assistants such as more advanced versions of Google Assistant, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, Apple's Siri or IBM's Watson.

On top of the self-driving cars soon, several companies including Amazon, Just Eat, Drone Deliveries Canada and others were automating deliveries from distribution center to individual homes experimentally in 2016.  No more pizza delivery boy to your door!

Since 70% of all jobs fall into the commercial and transportation buckets these days, how can the economy support all the people.  People need to eat, drink, and stay somewhere after all... and it is our salaries that allow us to pay for stuff produced by the A.I. in the first place.

It is a catch 22.  A.I. replaces workers to make goods & services.  Workers don't get paid so can't buy goods & services.  A.I. goes out of work????

This path leads to a paradigm shift where we'll need to figure out a way where everyone needn't worry about feeding themselves or where they will sleep and at the same time have a way to acquire or make whatever widget they need to do anything.

Now I know what most of you are thinking:  we've been at this juncture before.   New tech always creates new jobs for people to do so the economy is fine the way it is.

Well, not this time for a very simple reason:  the technology, A.I., in itself is designed to be a replacement for work.  We're not creating robots to replace workers at the car manufacturing plant here (which incidentally created lots of jobs in the computers, robotics and automation fields back then).  Heck, the A.I. we'll create will eventually be better than us at creating the next generation of A.I. and so on.

In a world where A.I. and robots do most of the work, humans would be free to do whatever they choose to create value for themselves in the world since money changes in meaning.  Artificial intelligence will be able to run the world and keep us doing what we do best and prefer:  follow our passions, whatever that may be.

I'm leaving the ramifications of all that for my upcoming book but in a nutshell, you can check out the concept of Paradism to think more about it all.

Right now, we have multiple A.I. that are even able to do art and of course the sex industry, looking for more money in the robotics and A.I. space, are making a go at it as well.  We even have done great work with A.I. in order to ensure computers of tomorrow will understand emotions.

Be ready to choose your new occupation soon 'cause it won't be a job.  When?  Well, as soon as most basic infrastructure for food and housing will be automated, it'll be fairly easy then to transition from worker to Human.  The technology to do exactly that is here TODAY.  It's only a question of time for the systems to be put in place in enough businesses for it all to be felt.

Give it a few years.....