The Future is Now
In dieser Episode reden Nico und Ich über die verschieden Formen von Brain-Computer Interfaces und was man damit machen kann. Für mehr Informationen oder Feedback besuche https://mkannen.tech
A team of researchers published an article on their research on biocomputing. It goes in-depth about the potential of such systems and how to build them. The core idea is to grow brain tissue out of stem cells to use the high energy efficiency and ability to perform complex tasks with organoid-computer interfaces. Instead of copying the human brain with AI, we use it directly as a computing device. Since it is much more likely to develop conscious systems this way, the ethical side of this research is critical. The article also explores the ways this research can help understand our own brain and cognitive diseases. Research like this pushes our understanding of consciousness and intelligence.
Synchron has published peer-reviewed, long-term safety results from a clinical study in four patients for their brain-computer interface. The company is backed by Bezos and Gates and uses blood vessels to insert sensors into the brain which is less invasive and safer than inserting sensors directly into the brain like neuralink.
The Book “A World Without Work” by Daniel Susskind from 2020 is a thought-provoking book that explores the technological changes happening in today’s workforce and the potential impacts on society. Dr. Daniel Susskind, a Research Professor in Economics at King’s College London and a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University, examines how automation and artificial intelligence are affecting jobs and the future of work. He argues that we need to rethink our economic and social systems to adapt to the coming technological changes.
I greatly enjoyed reading the book and even though I was familiar with many of the topics, I still learned a lot, particularly about economics. The book is divided into three parts. The first part “The Context”, describes the history of Automation and shows the parallels and differences between Industrialization and today’s development. For example, the author portrays the Luddites and their fight against textile machinery which helps readers to understand the recent fight against Generative AI.
The second part “The Threat”, explains in great detail the different reasons for technological unemployment and why the negative effects of automation outweigh the positive ones. It also explains how the current development leads to ever-greater inequality. Although many of the numbers were not new to me, the author manages to connect all the dots and paints a coherent picture of the problem.
The last part “The Response”, discusses solutions on how to build a working society in a world without work. The author addresses big tech companies and their political power, and how states have to fight back and tax in a way that allows everyone to receive an appropriate part of the economic pie. In the end, he addresses the problem of meaning and how humans can cope with too much free time. My biggest problem with this part is the missing description of how to transition from today’s system to the proposed solution, which in my opinion, is the hardest part. The book ends with an overly optimistic view, placing a lot of trust in humans and governments to build a working system in the future. Unfortunately, I do not share this trust in humanity. I also wish that the author had addressed the influence of other aspects of scientific progress on the economy, such as longevity or space exploration. However, I understand that this would have been outside the scope of the book.
I highly recommend this book to everyone who is working or will be in the next decade. Regardless of your occupation, this book is relevant to you. I also wish that political leaders would read it and act as proposed, to prevent a dystopia where rampant unemployment makes many societies fall apart.
Overall, “A World Without Work” is a thought-provoking and important book that raises important questions about the future of work and the economy. The author provides a clear and concise overview of the current state of the job market and the potential consequences of technological changes. He also does a good job of providing a balanced and nuanced view of the potential impacts of these changes, highlighting both the potential benefits and drawbacks.
The author’s proposal for a universal basic income is well-argued.
The book offers a clear and viable solution for addressing the issues of unemployment and inequality that may arise as a result of these changes. However, it is important to note that the solutions proposed in the book are not easy to implement, and it will require a collective effort from society, governments, and big tech companies to overcome the challenges that come with technological advancements.
I was going to write about the Metaverse next, but the recent acceleration of technological progress convinced me to write about the singularity immediately before it is too late. The technological singularity is the event or the process when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and the speed of progress becomes so fast that no human can keep up. This might be a slow process, some argue we are already in the singularity, or it might be a sudden event, where people live their normal life and from one day to another, the earth gets transformed into a giant CPU by a swarm of self-replicating nanomachines. I cannot predict what it will be like and nobody can predict what will happen after, but I will try to predict the events on the way. My predictions are obviously subjective and will most likely not be precise, they should act as a wake-up call though, to show how fast it might happen. All my predictions neglect the high probability that humanity will destroy itself or will be destroyed by climate change, Sun storms, viruses, war, or something else. Most people without a deeper understanding of Moores’s law look back on the last 10 or 100 years and think we will just continue to develop. Some people who work in fields like machine learning or biology look at their progress at the moment and base their predictions on that. Very few people can to grasp exponential growth, but I tried to always keep it in mind when I make my predictions based on everything I know and believe and every source I can find.
Fusion reactor (2023-2026): Fusion is one of the core technologies that we need to fight climate change and solve the energy crises. With fusion reactors like Iter and advancements in artificial intelligence we are on a good way to solving fusion. Breakthroughs like this one are the reason why I am so confident that we will see an energy net plus from a fusion reactor in the next few years. I hope commercial use will be possible shortly after. Fusion technology is a perfect example where people thought it would take way longer because they only looked at the engineering side and ignored progress in areas like math and computing.
Quantum computing(now – 2025): quantum computers are already available and will be an essential part of the supercomputing landscape in the coming years. They will not be used in every household, instead, we will use them for cloud computing and solving big problems like machine learning or traffic control. The double exponential growth in quantum computing will blow their ability up in the next 3 years. I think quantum computers are one of the most overlooked technologies because it is so useless right now. But it is one of the fastest developing technologies at the moment and when they are ready they will unlock a lot of things at the same time.
Room temperature superconductors(2025-never): If and only if a room temperature superconductor exists, we will find it in the next 3 years. Material science will have the support of quantum computing and A.I. to find every possible material. This would be the single most important discovery of all time since it not only solves all energy problems but also allows for cheap transport like the hyperloop and many other applications. Examples like multilayered graphene show that there is still from for discovery but we have to wait and see if this dream is achievable.
AR glasses and contact lenses (2023-2025): In the next few years people will spend most of their time looking at or through a display. Both smart glasses and lenses are right around the corner and will change the way we interact with the internet forever. It is the technology that has the most impact on our everyday lives. the biggest obstacle for AR technology will be the bandwidth of our wireless technology. Since the computation of these devices will happen in the cloud or in our “smartphones” we need to send a lot of high-resolution video streams to a lot of people. current wifi and xG technology will not be enough and we have to wait for wifi 7 and 6G to achieve mass adoption.
VR (now-2025): Virtual reality is already part of modern gaming and will be part of the workspace in the coming years. The Hardware will be there in the next 2 years and will be affordable and good enough for all use cases at the end of 2025. I will talk about VR more when I write about the metaverse.
Brain-Computer-Interface (now-2030) BCIs are already in a test stage for medical applications. With companies like Neuralink, we will most likely see BCI in use for non-medical applications within the next 5 years. I do not believe they will be popular if they are not needed for a medical condition since the risk of putting a chip in your head is too high for most people. The only way I can imagine BCIs becoming mainstream in the next 10 years is through advancements in nanorobotics. With small nanorobots in our bloodstream, we can not only supervise our body but we can also use them as reading devices from inside our brain. The risks won’t be as high and the barrier of entry will be lower. I wrote more about that topic in my post about Human-Machine-Merging.
Robotics (now-2026): I think most physical tasks are already manageable by machines, but most of the time humans are still cheaper. With progress in robotics and third-world countries, machines will replace more and more physical jobs. The global economy and our society will have to change drastically. One of the biggest challenges will be to ensure that everyone profits from a world with an abundance of workforce, so we do not end up with an unemployed underclass.
Space Travel (2025-2030): I am not a fan of space travel. At least not now. It wastes money and time and brain power to get us to the moon or mars just so we can say we were there. The truth is that Mars and Moon are extremely unhabitable and survival is impossible for extended periods thanks to radiation, gravity, temperature, resources, and so on. While humanity will most likely spread out someday, if we survive that long, the idea should be to terraform Mars over a century with technology that will not be available for the next 15 years and let machines do it for us. Sending humans to Mars now is too early and just a waste. Sending machines on the other hand can be quite useful. Space is full of resources, and energy that we can harvest. And we also reached a point where looking out for potential threats to humanity can be useful since we achieved a level where we are able to prevent some of them.
The main reason why I couldn’t wait any longer with this post is the progress in A.I. While breakthroughs in machine learning models used to be a yearly event (GPT 1-3 for example) they started to appear monthly beginning with Aplhafold and nowadays they appear weekly with Models like dall2-2, Gato, Imagen, and other impressive results. Even compared to other exponential metrics like humanity’s energy consumption the growth in machine intelligence is sudden. While the first computer is not even 100 years old we already reached the point where the top supercomputer rival the human brain using the positive feedback loop of hardware and software improvements. If the exponential growth continues like this, machines will surpass the entirety of humanity around 2045. Newer studies suggest that quantum computers improve with double exponential speed, which would mean we reach this point even faster.
Let’s take a look at some of the recent achievements. When Dalle-2 came out in January 2021 people started to dream of an A.I. that could produce Videos out of prompts like Dalle did with pictures and they thought it could happen in the next 5 years. Just one year later we have CogVideo which produces short videos. People think we continue as we did in the last few years, but that is not how exponential growth works. Models like Gato, that can perform 600 different tasks are already impressive, but Gato is more like a proof of concept and is relatively small. Deepmind announced that they are in the process of training a bigger version, while other companies are already working on the next step. Not long until they appear daily and when the hardware can keep up, we will likely see the singularity within the next 5-10 years. It is impossible to say what will happen after that. It depends on factors like; Will the models develop consciousness or not? Will they help humanity or kill us? I think we are already at a point where machines outperform a single human in every single task depending on the metric. In the coming year or two, this will become increasingly obvious to the public when models like GPT-4 or Gato 2 get released. Maybe we find the missing idea for consciousness or maybe it will just appear when they become bigger and more capable but, in the end, it does not matter. They will outperform us and help to speed up the progress in every single area to a point where no human can ever follow. This brings me to the final and most important prediction: When will we achieve AGI (Artificial General Intelligence ) and ASI (Artificial SuperIntelligence)? I predict that we will have some form of AGI around 2025. ASI will greatly depend on the limits humans apply to a potential AGI. If we keep it disconnected from the internet and limit its input and output we can delay an ASI for a few more years, but If we give an AGI access to the internet, its own code, and enough hardware, it could be a matter of minutes.
Our governments were left behind when the internet emerged, and they never caught up. In the last five years, we left behind most of the general population, and in the coming five years not even the experts are going to keep up. We are going to experience the most eventful decade in human history, and there are few things we can do. I find the reactions of people who find out about the singularity quite interesting. Some lose all hope and motivation and become scared of the future and others cheer up and are looking forward to the moment the machine takes over. Many ask how they should prepare and it is hard to answer since nobody knows what will happen. I think it is clear that money will be irrelevant after the singularity, but I would never recommend anyone to waste all their money in the 5 years. It is quite the opposite. Having money could be highly important in the years before the singularity for things like Human-Machine-Merging. Other than that there is not much an individual can do besides hoping for a good outcome.
I want to take a look into the relationship between the human body and technology.
I am a huge fan of the symbiotic relationship between us and machines, but whenever I talk to my mother or someone who is not into technology, they get alienated by the idea of letting electronics into their body.
This is understandable, but I want to believe that there is something great that we can achieve if we leave our fear behind and solve the problems and risks that come with the fusion of humans and machines. There are many more steps to take before we become cyborgs as we know them from movies or games. We are taking them and we are already beyond the point of no return.
Maybe you heard people calling each other out for behaving like zombies when using their smartphones and the smartphone is the most prominent indicator of this kind of change, but there is more.
I will go from apparent things to some that you maybe never thought about.
Let’s start with “wearables”, small devices like watches, trackers, headphones, and glasses.
I think we can agree that they all are part of our path to merge with machines even if some people try to argue that they just use them as a tool and
can live without them. The truth is our brain is so adaptive that once we use a tool often enough and it is always available our brain will just accept it as part of our body. This may sound strange, but experiments and studies show that this happens quickly. One experiment that I want to bring up as an example was done by the University of Pittsburgh, which used a brain-computer interface to connect a monkey to a robotic arm.
It didn’t take long for the ape to use the robotic arm like his own.
He performed tasks like eating intuitively with his extra arm and became visibly confused after they removed the brain-computer interface again. Of course, a BCI is a much more extreme example than a smartwatch, but don’t make the mistake to think there is a huge difference between
a brain-computer interface and normal tools, just because the connection is more direct.
If you use your thump only to type messages and for nothing else, then the part of your brain that controls your thump is reprogrammed just like the brain of the ape. I will talk about the brain-computer interface later when we come to the next steps in human-machine merging,
but first, let us go back to the more subtle things that influence us and merge with us: Drugs. Ok this may sound strange but drugs are not as far away from machines then you might think and the road ahead of us is quite clear. Modern medicine and medical tools like CRISPR become more and more complex.
From simple molecules that stop pain or help our stomach, we moved to complex molecular structures that perform actions like cutting DNA and killing viruses. The idea of nanomachines that perform sophisticated actions in our body is not science-fiction but is already in development. 2022 made one thing clear,
people are afraid of medicine they don’t understand. So the question is, will people accept machines in their drugs? I think yes. Not because I have a lot of trust in humanity, but because I have a lot of trust in the greed and envy of people.
If you combine the greed of the pharma industry with the desire of people to stay healthy and some good marketing, you get a big market for the next generation of medical devices and drugs. Now that we have already looked at the future, let me explain what I imagine will happen in the next 10 years.
I will differentiate between people who grew up with a smartphone (2001 and younger) and those who are older ( 2000-1960 ). I am sorry but for everyone older than that the following topics are not that interesting (I will probably write another blog post about Longevity escape velocity, but that’s another topic).
The next step after the smartphone is AR glasses. I am not talking about full VR,(Metaverse is another topic I will write about at some point) but light AR glasses that are indistinguishable from normal glasses. They will be an important step since they will merge our virtual life with the real world.
Many people in the younger group spend more time awake on the internet than in the real world.
This may sound extreme for some people but having 6-8hr on a smartphone and pc combined is not that rare nowadays. Ar-glasses will increase these numbers and every person using one will be online whenever they are awake. This means our brain will interact even more often and directly with the machine.
The technology will be available in the next few years. As usual, the younger group will adapt first and the older generation will take 1-2 years more. For people who want to completely dive into the virtual world, contact lenses will be available just one or 2 years after glasses.
These are not just wild guesses of mine, the technology already exists, even the contact lenses, and just must become cheaper to produce. These non-invasive technologies will be adapted way faster than real brain-computer interfaces like Neuralink, where the barrier to entry is way higher and the risks are even greater.
Though in the end, the ultimate step will be such a device. It is hard to imagine how productive a human with a computer-enhanced mind can be.
I would guess that the overhead of bringing your thoughts and ideas into a useful form by using a keyboard, mouse, and some randomly designed computer interfaces is around 80%. Human productivity will skyrocket even with just a few million brain-computer interfaces.
There are a lot of risks though. While the first brain-computer interfaces will be unidirectional and only take inputs, at some point we will use the other direction too, to increase our input of information and to keep up with our own thoughts.
This step is incredibly dangerous and it is not hard to see how much could go wrong when a potentially dangerous device can manipulate our thoughts. Some might say these devices should be banned but as Fridrich Dürenmatt wrote in his book “the physicist”
Everything, that is thinkable, will be thought.
What Solomon found can also be found by someone else.
Fridrich Dürenmatt
we can’t stop the machine from being built and we also can’t stop anyone from using them, just like we failed with drugs, nuclear weapons, and many other things.
While mind-enhancing machines are the most powerful and life-changing devices, enhancing our bodies will also be possible.
If you imagine a cyborg you think about metal limps and build-in weapons, but we already have prostheses that surpass human legs in some aspects.
You may remember the debate about whether Pistorius and other disabled athletes had an advantage at the Olympics. But you probably never heard about someone cutting off their legs to get artificial ones.
I don’t believe it will become a trend to exchange limbs if it is not necessary from a medical standpoint, even if they become better than human limbs in every aspect.
Way more popular and already used are small implants with a variety of abilities.
From small NFC chips in our hands to replace keys to small devices under the skin that measure the blood sugar level and inject insulin automatically.
Another implant that is already used by some enthusiasts is a magnet on the tip of their finger.
It allows feeling electromagnetic waves like wires in the wall or the microwave in the room next door.
It sounds like a gimmick at first glance, but if you ask a group of aliens without ears if they want to attach something to their heads to feel pressure changes in the air, they will probably think the same.
I would argue that the number of senses we have is an entirely random outcome of evolution and increasing this number is the best way to enhance our worldview.
Every time we use technology to leverage our senses we will have a similar experience to a person who sees colors for the first time. We can live without it,
but it is just nicer to have it. Enhancing our senses is the second-best thing that we can do after enhancing our mind with machines. The last and least popular step will be increasing the motoric functions of our body. We could add arms to our body or have a small robot that we control with our minds, but at this point, we are already back at Brain-computer interfaces. I will end the post here to have a readable length. I hope the topic sparked your interest and I promise I will go into greater detail the next time I write about the merging of flesh and silicon.
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