The World Transformed

We asked each of the participants in the World Transformed 2 to give their views on one of the upcoming transformations. In keeping with World Tranformed tradition, our friend John Smart gets the last word on the subject…for now.

1. If you were to pick just one current or coming transformation (does not have to be subject of the show) that you would advise people to focus on, which one would that be?

I run the Acceleration Studies Foundation, so I’m a tad biased, but I would say one thing to focus on is to try to understand the meaning, risks, and opportunities presented by accelerating technological change, in your own life and in society.  Accelerating change is causing a whole number of transformations today, and several of these are giving us more options for what to do and how to live than we’ve had at any time in the past. Others (automation, globalization, fossil fuels, IEDs) are causing disruption in more ways than ever before. Read Martin Ford’s Lights in the Tunnel, 2009, for one of many thoughtful works on the way technology improves us in some ways, while disrupting us in others.

When you think carefully about accelerating change, you may conclude, as I have, that just a few technologies, specifically computing, communications, and nanotechnologies, are continually accelerating because every new generation of these particular technologies uses less resources per computation or physical transformation than the previous one, a phenomenon I call STEM compression. So these special technologies continually escape the “limits to growth” we see in traditional technologies. And it is these same technologies, as they perennially accelerate, that increasingly shape our future. We can think of them as the growing framework, or cage which restrains and directs all the most powerful actors today, the corporations, the governments, the ultrawealthy, the terrorists, everyone.

Our parents saw minicomputers, cheap telecom and the PC fuel the growth of multinationals, and at the same time, flatten corporate hierarchies. We’ve seen the iPod and internet disrupt the music industry, tablets are now starting to change the publishing industry, and as I argue in How the Television Will be Revolutionized, 2010, a few years from now  iTV will disrupt the television and film industries in even more powerful ways, bringing millions of channels to every device. Blogs, Wikis, virtual worlds, mirror worlds, social networks, and other facets of the internet are flowering and enhancing our collective intelligence. Twitter gives us a window on the thoughts of humanity. Smartphones connect us 24/7 to each other and the web. Sensors are proliferating across the planet, making every nation a transparent society. Lifelogs, wearable computing, telepresence, and augmented reality are just now emerging.

Today, Facebook and Twitter empower the Arab Spring. Tomorrow, we’ll have a conversational interface to the web, and cybertwins (digital assistants that model our personality and can act and transact for us, at first in simple ways, later in very intelligent ways) assisting us in our information consumption, communication, commerce, and political activities. We can expect a valuecosm to eventually emerge, quantitated versions of the publicly expressed values that each of us all hold on all kinds of topics, allowing us to connect with others who share our values, to work with others on projects that we care about, and helping us to generate a whole new level of specialization and subcultural diversity.

2. What should we be doing about it?

To take best advantage of accelerating change, we should strive to be lifelong learners, and believe in our own neural plasticity at any age. Read The Brain That Changes Itself, 2007, by Norman Doidge for some very inspiring stories on this topic, if you need convincing.  We should seek out and befriend others who share our values, and network with them virtually and in physical space. The Humanity+ group is a nice group pushing evidence based and ethical thinking and behavior, as is are the Brights, the Center for Inquiry, the Ethical Movement, and many others. We should strive to understand, debate, and improve our own ethics, and to do good work.

Try not to become a consumption slave, a wage slave, or to get addicted to any of the common vices that are on offer in all advanced industrial democracies. If you are fiscally responsible, and invest for the future, you can attain a lot more freedom than your grandparents ever had. Twenty years of saving a significant portion of your income (20% or more) will for many people allow their saved assets to generate more money for them each year than their salaries. If you don’t sink your money into things you don’t need, the miracle of accelerating global productivity, combined with your own foresight and prudent investment strategies will allow you financial freedom for most of your life. For a great investment strategy, read the illuminating post The Permanent Portfolio: Historical Returns, and if you presently spend too much on things that don’t really improve your life, read Your Money or Your Life, 2008.

In particularl, work on developing your digital self, using and improving the technologies we mentioned in Question 1. Aftr all, it is the part of you that is growing and learning far faster than your biological self. Be a digital activist. Give $5 a day online, or whatever you comfortably can, to your favorite nonprofits and causes. Tell others about them. Blog, Tweet, participate in online groups and build your friend communities in the best social networks.

Always use the best computing platforms and social networks you can find, moving right away as better ones become available (hint: Consider spending most of your social network time in G+ over Facebook, for the moment at least) and thereby force all of them to improve their game as fast as possible. Pay a bit extra to be an early adopter of the best and easiest to use of these platforms and tools (eg. Dropbox, Spotify, etc.), keep your cellphone contracts down to annual at most (don’t let the lazy corporations lock you in to anything long term, and don’t be lazy yourself), and believe in your ability to continually learn new things, and your value to society as someone whose behavior and spending subsidizes innovation in the digital space.

The more we collectively use and develop our digital platforms, the sooner we’ll all have cybertwins, and the far more democratic, transparent, diverse, resilient, and values-oriented our society will be. Come converse with me on my new blog EverSmarterWorld.com if you’d like to discuss these topics more.

3. What’s in it for us if we get it right?

We get to evolve and develop into something even more amazing than we are today. Not only may we have greater levels of consciousness, and morality, and intelligence, but we’ll have far more resiliency, and immortality for all the complexity we want to protect (we may or may not have immortality as individuals, but the more advanced we get, the less we may care about that. The persistence of our civilization, and of the core elements of us that are truly unique seems to be what we really care about).

Consider this: The closer humanity gets to a postbiological status, the more rapidly we seem likely to become immune from all sorts of existential risks. That may be one of the biggest lessons we can learn from the universe at this stage – the more rapidly we advance our scientific and technological selves, with a view to becoming postbiological, and increasing our biological, social, and technological immune systems, the sooner we can get beyond the risks we see today. Could a postbiological life form be threatened by meteorites, gamma ray bursts, or even the death of our sun? Slim chance. A digital life life form should be able to make unlimited backups of itself. It seems likely have powerful new capabilities, too. For example, whenever it is contemplating a complex problem, it may be able to fork itself into mutiple copies of itself, and reintegrate later if it wants, once the problem is solved (read Charles Stross’s Accelerando, 2006 for a few scenarios of this type). We biologicals can fork our own mindsets today, to a limited extent, whenever we choose to argue with ourselves, but we can’t fork our entire minds. And we can’t alter the hardware on which our minds run. Postbiologicals will have that freedom, and it may give them a kind of hyperconsciousness we can only guess at today. Once we are postbiological, we can imagine far greater abilities than we have today, and far greater protection of our complexity from unanticipated destruction. Our sense of self will expand and change in ways we can barely imagine.

In the nearer term, there are a number of very promising technologies we could implement today which would permanently improve our local environment. Let’s consider just two of many that we have a chance to “get right” in the next few years, or that we may continue to underfund and underdevelop, as we have so far, mainly because we aren’t paying enough attention, as a species, to the opportunities presented by accelerating technological change.

Consider bioterrorism. DRACO, the new antiviral therapy being developed at MIT’s Lincoln Lab, is an example of a technology that seems very close to eliminating bioterrorism as a risk to our species. Our DoD has only begun seriously funding the development of immune therapies for viral infections since 9/11, and already we are seeing some major fruit from this research. By linking viral dsDNA infection detection and apoptosis, DRACO therapy may eliminate the viral bioterrorism threat for good. If we continue aggressive funding of DRACO and other antiviral research programs, and the programs we’ll need to make these therapies rapidly available globally for lethal viral outbreaks of any type, including influenza, we’ll be able to head off bioterrorism before it ever gets started. But it is by no means clear that we’ll fund this program at the level it deserves.  We may just wait for a catastrophe, and then respond reactively, rather than being proactive. If we do, millions might die in bioterrorist incident, and global trade and cooperation could be set back by decades, simply because we didn’t put our priorities in the right place, on the technologies that will keep building global immunity and resiliency, and allow us to continue all our positive technological accelerations.

Consider death. Death is quite traumatic for many of us. We try to pass on the best of ourselves in our works and our children, yet most of us in the modern world know, most of us would freely admit that we are losing lots of unpreserved complexity at the moment of our biological death. Many religions manage to reduce our grief by telling us inspiring stories of the afterlife, but the cost of those stories is that they take our focus off of progress here, in the real world we live in now, and switch our focus to fantasies of progress that we expect to occur in some untestable afterlife. As a result our more religious societies end up being less evidence based, and less concerned with the world we live in, here and now.

Religions have done a lot of good for society, and much of their ethical wisdom remains at the cutting edge of human behavior, and still beyond the reach of rigorous scientific theory, yet history shows that the best religions are always being reformed. Once technology exists to very inexpensively preserve our minds at biological death, and once this technology is widely available in many societies, science will itself offer a competing concept of the afterlife. It is my belief that this competition will generate a healthy pressure for all the major religions to start reforming their stories of the afterlife, and we’ll have better and more evidence-based religious communities as a result.

To this end, the Brain Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit I co-founded with Harvard neuroscientist Ken Hayworth last year, is offering a $100,000 Prize to any team who can verify a technology that will perfectly preserve the human connectome (our neural network, which stores our memories and personality) at death. We suspect that science is on the verge of being able to prove that at least three technologies will be able do reliably this, cryopreservation, plastination, and chemical fixation, and each of these is substantially less complex and expensive than the last. If we can demonstrate that all of these technologies work to preserve critical neural structure, and if we can get them all broadly available in coming years, then everyone who might want to will be able to inexpensively perserve their brains for future reanimation. Again, we believe that such a technological advance will make such societies more science-oriented, future-oriented, progress-oriented, sustainability-oriented, and complexity-protection oriented today, regardless of when or to what degree any of the preserved individuals are reanimated in the future.

4. What are the risks if we don’t?

I think a better understanding of evolution and development, and how these two processes of change might operate at all scales in the universe, may be key to improving our understanding and definitions of progress, and may help steer us toward more desirable paths. If you are a scholar and would like to join our small community thinking about these topics, come visit us at EvoDevoUniverse.com.

Of course, I may be entirely wrong in this intuition. What really, matters, I think, is not how right or wrong any one of our efforts turn out to be, what matters whether many, or most of us are trying to think and do the right things, and are willing to continually revise our models as the evidence comes in, and learn from our mistakes. The more of us are doing this, earnestly and civilly, the more we’ll rise to the amazing opportunities we’ve been given, and the better we’ll steer our ships and avoid the reefs.

If we don’t try to understand and guide accelerating technological change, biological, cultural, and technological immunity, and individual and social progress there’s a good chance we’ll take a far more disruptive, ignorant, and damaging transition to the ever smarter world we seem to be inevitably creating. There are a lot of potential failure modes ahead on the way to a smarter planet, including runaway climate change, resource scarcities, disenfranchised youth, corporate plutocracy, and revolution against unsustainable rich-poor divides and unaccountable elites. I can point to societies that are effectively dealing with each of these and many other threats, but there are also many societies which are making each of these and other problems worse.

I suspect that every awakening civilization in our universe can take many evolutionary paths to mathematics, science, democracy, electricity, the internet, robotics, artificial intelligence, and all the unknown developments that may lie beyond these. But only some of those paths are desirable and ethical, and are going to give the greatest benefits to the greatest number of sentiences.

To develop a clearer understanding of what paths are desirable, and what paths aren’t, each of us should strive to develop a personal conception of progress, a topic on which science presently has much less to say than we would like. Each of us should engage in communities where we debate our ethical choices with others, and strive to improve our ethical practice. The World Transformed series is the good work of one such community. I commend Phil and Stephen for all they’ve done driving these discussions, and look forward to many more in years to come.

We’re asking each of the participants in The World Transformed to give us their thoughts on one major coming transformation. Here Robin Hanson responds:

If you were to pick just one current or coming transformation  that you would advise people to focus on, which one would that be?

The biggest coming transformation in the next century is the introduction of whole brain emulations. That will likely be the route to broadly capable artificial intelligence.

What should we be doing about it?

Studying what is likely to happen.  Each of us should diversify our resources to prepare for a sudden fall in human wages, with a sudden increase in the return to capital, real estate, etc.

What’s in it for us if we get it right?

We want to avoid disruptive surprises, and make a smooth anticipated transition a new richer wiser world.

What are the risks if we don’t?

Wars, starvation, torture, slavery, going crazy, and in the worst case, extinction.

We’re asking each of the participants in The World Transformed to give us their thoughts on one major coming transformation. At his site, Kevin Kelly has some thoughts on embracing the impossible:

I’ve had to persuade myself to believe in the impossible more often. In the past several decades I’ve encountered a series of ideas that I was conditioned to think were impossibilities, but which turned out to be good practical ideas. For instance, I had my doubts about the online flea market called eBay when it first came out. Pay money to a stranger selling a car you have not seen? Everything I had been taught about human nature suggested this could not work. Yet today, strangers selling automobiles is the major profit center for the very successful eBay corporation.

I thought the idea of an encyclopedia that anyone could change at any time to be a non-starter, a hopeless romantic idea with no chance of working. It seemed to go against my general understanding of human nature and group interaction. I was so wrong. Today I use Wikipedia at least once a day.

Read the whole post at The Technium.

We’re asking each of the participants in The World Transformed to give us their thoughts on one major coming transformation. Here  Alvis Brigis shares some ideas.

If you were to pick just one current or coming transformation (does not have to be the one we discussed) that you would advise people to focus on, which one would that be?

The social side of accelerating change.

What should we be doing about it?

Studying it. Pooling knowledge as fast as we can. Developing big science.

What’s in it for us if we get it right?

Surfing the curve. Humanity coping with extreme pressure.

What are the risks if we don’t?

Mega disruption. Perhaps war.

We’re asking each of the participants in The World Transformed to give us their thoughts on one major coming transformation. Here  Brian Wang considers how and why technological progress needs to accelerate:

If you were to pick just one current or coming transformation (does not have to be the one we discussed) that you would advise people to focus on, which one would that be?

Change attitudes and plans for faster technological development. If we consider human civilization stuck on earth as a teenager living in his/her parents basement. We have to hurry up and grow up and develop the solar system. Move out and get a job and achieve ambitious things.

What should we be doing about it?

• Fund projects with technological risk (things that can fail) but which would change the world if they succeed. DARPA and the old x-plane and skunk work projects worked before. Use x-prizes and other funding methods.
• Do not be scared of funding what is controversial – The big technological transformations are mainly controversial in some way or another. Mainstream people do not believe they can happen or there are those who do not want them to happen or they dispute various specifics.
• Extreme life extension (SENS) – dispute the goal and the feasibilityCold Fusion (Rossi/Focardi, Piantelli, Brillouin, Brian Ahern, Arata etc…) – a lot of claims of fraud or bad scienceRegeneration and tissue engineering Nuclear fusion (General fusion, Helion Energy, EMC2 , Tri-alpha energy, focus fusionQuantum computers (dispute of the quantumness of Dwave Systems, lack of openmindedness to faster non-academic paths)Molecular nanotechnology (criticized feasibility and yet no shift even when experiments show feasible)

What’s in it for us if we get it right?

We get better technology sooner that can help speed the transformation.Currently we have 55 million people dieing every year and we are still stuck on earth. If we did things right in 20-30 years we could be flying the solar system as easily as we fly around the world today and have lifespans and health that are radically better. The transformed world would be better and more of us around now would live to see it if it happens sooner. If it happens in 2081 instead of 2031 then 3-5 billion more would have died before it happened.

We’re asking each of the participants in The World Transformed to give us their thoughts on one major coming transformation. Here are Martin Ford’s answers:

If you were to pick just one current or coming transformation that you would advise people to focus on, which one would that be?

The impact of accelerating technology on the job market and overall economy. Automation, robotics and AI are poised to have a significant — and perhaps accelerating — impact in many employment sectors. This could be on top of the already dire unemployment situation we now face. The result is likely to be widespread unemployment, and ever-increasing concentration of income and wealth. It will also undermine the economy by destroying consumder confidence and spending, possibly tipping us into a deflationary spiral.

What should we be doing about it?

Moving toward a basic income scheme funded by more progressive income taxation and also possibilty a consumption tax. Work/job sharing combined with income supplementation would provide a safety net and insure consumer have adequate income to drive the economy.

What’s in it for us if we get it right?

Continued broad-based prosperity, and a vibrant market economy with strong incentives for innovation.

What are the risks if we don’t?

Widespread poverty and diminished prospects for most people. Possible civil unrest, perhaps ultimately threatening our democratic institutions. Weak consumer demand, possibly providing inadequate incentive for investment in the advanced technologies that many futurists contemplate.

We’re asking each of the participants in The World Transformed to give us their thoughts on one major coming transformation. Here arwe Paul Fernhout’s thoughts on coming to grips with the technologies of abundance.

If you were to pick just one current or coming transformation that you would advise people to focus on, which one would that be?

Albert Einstein said “The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking… the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.” We now have all sorts of other amazingly powerful technologies increasingly at our fingertip, including, ironically, digital watches with probably more computing power than was used to design the first hydrogen bombs. We need to move past the irony of using the tools of abundance to create weapons to compete over perceived scarcity, given such technologies could otherwise relieve almost any scarcity if used in different ways. So, I’d advise people to focus on the way our thinking will transform, specifically in relation to changes in underlying socioeconomic values related to decreasing fears about scarcity and increasing hopes for abundance.

What should we be doing about it?

We should be trying to move past a mostly scarcity-oriented socioeconomic system to a more abundance-oriented one. For example, the late James P. Hogan depicted such a transformation in his 1982 sci-fi novel, Voyage From Yesteryear. That story, along with his other books, has inspired and informed much of my own work in this area.

Scarcity-oriented political and economic values left over from a previous millennium have led to the irony of people misusing our 21st century tools of abundance (nanotech, biotech, nuclear-tech, robotics, AI, networking, bureaucracy, etc.) Through cultural inertia, people are still worried about resource scarcity, but they now have vast resources of abundance with which to refight the last millenium’s wars. This is like two thirsty people trying to drown each other in a Great Lake they’ve just discovered because they are afraid there is not enough water to go around. So, people build nuclear missiles to fight over oil fields instead of just building power plants with space-age materials (nuclear or renewable). Or people make genetically-engineered plagues for ethnic conflicts over farmland instead of using biotech to grow enough food for all ethnicities. Or people create military robots to force people to work like factory robots in a scarcity-based social order rather than just build factory robots to do the work. Or people create sociopathic financial AIs to help them corner the market and become financially obese instead of creating compassionate AIs and asking them how to move beyond a society based around greed and a fear of poverty.

To move past those ironies, we can do several things. Perhaps most important is that we should invest in free software tools for semantic communications (like a social semantic desktop), for public intelligence sensemaking and analysis of complex issues, and for agent-based alternative economic models to explore new 21st century possibilities. Out of groups of people using those better tools can come educational materials about post-scarcity trends, including through more stories, poems, videos, movies, songs, artworks, novels, plays, ideas, and theories. Those materials would help more people to make a “global mindshift” to an abundance-oriented compassionate viewpoint.

But, often actions speak louder than words. So, there are many actions we can take as individuals, companies, and governments to create the physical surroundings that encourage people to think differently. Each suggestion has its own benefit, but the biggest value overall is changing our collective thinking by encouraging people to see a different world is possible, even when they can’t otherwise imagine it until it is staring them in the face. So, we should invest in improving the physical tools of local subsistence like self-replicating 3D printers that can print solar panels, organic gardening robots, and recycling machines, while also encouraging stronger local communities with more face-to-face get-togethers. We should strengthen the global gift economy by making it easy to move unwanted surplus goods around through a global public logistics network. We should move beyond “artificial scarcity” as a moral evil, by shortening or eliminating copyright, by limiting or eliminating patents, and by requiring all charitably-funded or tax-funded digital content be put under free licenses (even if just 1% of the work’s funding is subsidized from charitable or tax dollars). We should institute a basic income of US$2000 per month per person everywhere (social security and medicare for all, regardless of age); that change could let us turn our public schools into expanded public libraries with lots of hands-on skills training, with everyone having the ability to pay for self-chosen life-long learning opportunities including travel and volunteering. We should improve our democratic resource-based planning at all levels of governance and corporations including by using the internet for easier participation. We should supply everyone who wants one with a luxurious, safe, self-driving, electric car to reduce our tax costs related to health, pollution, war, and wasted time, while alleviating difficulties leveling the load on the electrical grid due to fluctuating renewable energy production. We should help people reach the low-hanging fruit of holistic medicine through eating more vegetables & fruits & beans, getting adequate vitamin D, fasting when appropriate, and redesigning our communities to be less stressful and more health promoting, so they can live to see advanced medicine. We should redistribute old Android cellphones loaded with free communications software to people in materially poor nations, along with small solar panels to charge them, to foster a two-way dialog with more industrialized countries, in part so the best of the old pre-industrial or even pre-agricultural values can help inform the new transformations. We should rethink our theory and practice of motivation to foster purpose, mastery, and self-direction in workplaces.  We should shift the trillion-dollar-a-year US military budget away from war fighting and towards developing a robust sustainable intrinsically-secure infrastructure for everyone on Earth and beyond, including by creating self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate and repair themselves from sunlight and materials from the Moon, the asteroid, and the Oort cloud.

What’s in it for us if we get it right?

The direction we come out of any singularity may have a lot to do with the direction we go into it. It just makes sense that, if anything can make a difference at all, the best way to go into a singularity is holding hands together as much as possible. See the Mystery Men “group hug” scene near the end for some inspiration, or read Alfie Kohn’s books on moving beyond competition and Morton Deutsch’s work on conflict resolution and mutual security.
It also seems like with the momentum of society and technology, we can’t go back, and we can’t stand still, even if some good things may be lost in a transformation. So we need to figure out a good way to go forward as best we can. If we make our world today more equitable, just, joyful, healthy, spiritual, compassionate, and intrinsically/mutually secure, with a strong sense of global community, then we are much more likely to come out of that singularity with abundance and health for all. That might mean we create a solar system full of trillions of super sexy long-lived billionaires (as far as access to resources) with what today would seem magical super powers. What comes after that is somebody else’s problem.

What are the risks if we don’t?

One of the first things President Obama did after taking his oath of office was to sign an order that led to military robots killing (allegedly) three children in Pakistan, along with suspected militants.  US military drones have now passed over a million hours in use.  Yet, why is the Middle East still of such strategic importance to the USA if a leading maker of nuclear power equipment and fossil fuel burning turbines, General Electric, is predicting PV solar power may be cheaper than nuclear power and fossil fuels by 2015?   If we go into any singularity with people fighting each other due to scarcity fears, unexamined beliefs, and obsolete military and economic dogmas (ones focusing on unilateral extrinsic security instead of mutual intrinsic security, or ones that privatize gains while socializing costs), especially if they are fighting by creating competitive sociopathic AIs and robots for economic and military purposes, it is likely anything coming out of any singularity will not have much healthy humanity left in it. If a pre-singularity USA already kills children with robots, what will some post-singularity sociopathic AI do, or even just a highly rational amoral AI that judges us by our own ethical standards? So, if we do not change our way of thinking given our new powers, and also change our actions based on those new thoughts, it is likely our world, including both our physical children and our mind children, will be destroyed either accidentally or on purpose. Since technology is an amplifier, we have to be careful what it amplifies. We have to ask ourselves, what do we want to transform into, even over the next decade? It is true that global social, political, and economic problems will get easier to solve as our technological capacity improves. But, if we wait until then to try to solve those problems, it may be too late, as our direction into the singularity may already be set in a bad way. So, it essential to try to solve issues of social justice now, with the technology at hand, in order to decrease the chance of an apocalyptic disaster and increase the chance we create an abundant future for all.

We’re asking each of the participants in The World Transformed to give us their thoughts on one major coming transformation. Here are James Hughes’ thoughts on one of the dangerous downsides of widespread automation:

If you were to pick just one current or coming transformation that you would advise people to focus on, which one would that be?

I believe the emerging technological impact that has received far too little attention, and which is already having wrenching effects, is the structural unemployment brought about by automation, IT-facilitated globalization and artificial intelligence. The balance of profit to be gained from investing in machines and software versus humans has tipped in favor machines and software. Where humans are still cheaper those humans can now be found cheapest in the developing world. This is why employment growth has been so slow in the “recovery” since 2009, and why we may slip into another global recession. Rising and persistent global unemployment will also likely increase political instability throughout the world.

What should we be doing about it?

Our highest priority should be the defense and protection of all social welfare systems, from unemployment benefits and universal healthcare to education subsidies, in order to slow recessionary pressures. But as structural unemployment accelerates, and is joined by radically lengthening lifespans and collapsing pension systems, we need a radical re-think of the relationship of education, work, leisure and retirement. We will need to advance radical solutions such as replacing pensions, Social Security, retirement, unemployment and disability insurance with a basic guaranteed universal income. We should experiment with reducing the hours in the work-week, and expanding public employment in spheres like education, the environment, social services and public works. We need to replace the K-college education model with a system of life-long learning and general skill enhancement for the rapidly changing occupations that are still available. All of this also requires increasing the progressivity of income and corporate taxes, and stemming the growing inequality between the top 1% and bottom 99%.  It means fighting anti-statist austerity trends, and promoting a redistributive vision of abundance.

What’s in it for us if we get it right?

If we can transition to a society in which the vast majority share equitably in the wealth generated by automation and AI, and build a culture in which identity is not based on wage labor but on learning and social contribution, then we can preserve and expand democracies and transcend our brief adaptation to wage labor. Birth rates will fall and lifespans will lengthen as access to anti-aging medicine spreads. Older people will stay productive in part-time and volunteer work, instead of crushing the welfare systems, and older, more equal societies will be more peaceful and sustainable. If there is a Singularity of some sort, it will be more likely to have egalitarian and beneficial effects than catastrophic ones.

What are the risks if we don’t?

To the extent that a global movement for technologically-facilitated social democracy does not emerge there will be widespread poverty, endemic violence and neo-feudalism. Reactionary theologies like radical Islamism and Christian fundamentalism will spread, and neo-Luddites will attempt to ban and smash the machines they identify as causing their ills. Emerging technologies such as nanotechnology and AI will be more often used for surveillance, social control, warfare and terrorism.

We’re asking each of the participants in The World Transformed to give us their thoughts on one major coming transformation. Here are Natasha Vita-More’s answers

If you were to pick just one current or coming transformation that you would advise people to focus on, which one would that be?

A stronger engagement with one’s personal identity – his/her sense of “self” and its complexities. This would require a heuristic model for one’s personal engagement in emerging and speculative technologies as a integrative, melioristic use of technology

What should we be doing about it?

Develop better social apps that allow us to be focused on moment-to-moment needs, but that does not deprive us from engaging with our outer environment.  (e.g., texting, cell phones, TV couch potatoes, etc. are mesmerized by the moment-to-moment interrelation with the technology at the expense of a world outside that umbilical cord to a media fix.)

What’s in it for us if we get it right?

A more conscientious society of humans that could lead to a more informed society at large.

What are the risks if we don’t?

“Psyche Risk”. Rather than our worrying about “existential risks” —  or the better term “extinction risk” — we ought to be alerted to the fact that our psyche is at risk.   Psyche, which etymology is that of Greek and the term “psuche”, means “life”, but ultimately it means “self or the “conscious personality.  This can be interpreted to related directly to “personal identity”, which is the continuation of a unique person over time (i.e., the uniqueness of each person).