If we believe we should leave everything to technology to solve all of our problems, we might be making a big mistake.
That’s the core messages from deep thinker and thought leader Daniel Smachtenberger. Daniel is specialized in catastrophic risk analyses.
He’s a busy man lately.
And he’s showing us a way out, or better said, he has the capacity to think himself a way out to…well, most of our current big issues.
How cool is that!
A major one is our exponentially growing big tech.
In a recent Podcast, Daniel explains why we historically are bad stewards over our technology and how exponential growing tech in the age of quantum computing, machine learning and A.I, coupled with a predatory capitalist system that mainly runs on perverse incentives, will self-terminate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ0l56vjTss
The way out?
Daniel gives an inspiring outlook on how our modern technology can also help us forward towards a more transparent, less corrupt civilization where education is at the core of empowering people for better sense-making.
These are three areas where A.I and tech can help us grow as humans and support us in building a better world.
Blockchain can end government corruption
This one seems easy and can be best understood. Since a Blockchain is a transparent digital ledger, we can ask (or force) governments to put all their finances and spending on a publicly available database, the Blockchain.
When we put this in the perspective on how much federal money disappears or otherwise ends up in very nontransparent constructions, tech can and will solve a major issue, that will also save billions of dollars worldwide.
In fact, 3.6 billion according to research in 2018 by the W.E.F. That’s a whopping 5 per cent of the global gross domestic product (GDP),
It’s a pretty big issue.
Corruption leads to less stable countries. This leads to conflicts and often ends up in war. This, in turn, is profitable for the entities that often started the corruption.
U.N Secretary-General António Guterres confirms this already back in 2018, stating;
“Corruption can be a driver of conflict, upon which it thrives, and is linked to such forms of instability as illicit trafficking in arms, drugs and people, terrorism and violent extremism. The problem is present in all nations — rich and poor, North and South, developed and developing” — António Guterres in a first ever U.N meeting on corruption in 2018
When applying Blockchain tech can tackle this problem, a direct result is wiping the world rid of most of its nastiest things.
That’s a huge win.
How A. I can make us better humans and improve voting
A.I can take a number of real faces and create a new face out of this, that actually doesn’t exist. It's the average of all faces you feed the A.I.
Now, imagine we use the same underlying A. I tech to look at a semantic field of proposals people have, and come up with a new proposition that is the weighted centre of all these propositions.
When you scale this and make a humongous input of human propositions, this could lead to better propositions as in a weighted centre.
That’s achieving the goal of voting, but now much closer to the heart of democracy than our actual voting system is.
What we call voting isn’t real democracy. In fact, according to one of the founding fathers of the U.S, voting is the death of democracy. It’s just proof that people didn’t reach a consensus through discussion. Like citizens used to do in town-halls in the early years of the U.S.
Attention hijack attacks can be bend to serve your learning
It’s pretty widespread knowledge now that Facebook uses a tremendous amount of personal data to make a profile of you, to maximize your time on sight. You probably recognize the effect that you only wanted to check your Facebook for a minute and now it's one hour later.
W.T.F?
Facebook got billions of people on the planet literally addicted to screen-time through cleverly executed limbic hijacks. Young adults up to 14 hours a day. The result of a profit model to sell ads.
Why not use the same tech to make better, more educated humans?
The same A. I can be focused on pedagogical purposes. The same data now can be used to create personalized suggestions to maximize your rate of learning and development.
In the crypto space, Holochain is coming close with offering a web3 environment for apps that run on mutual agreements. This agreement could be to educate users and offering them roadmaps, content and smart metric where their development can go next.
The choice is ours
These 3 examples can help turn around today's exponential tech crash course when its goal and purpose is only to serve perverse incentives that drive profit models.
The short term outlook for our society is that 2 billion people will be out of a job soon through automation, replaced by robotics, most of it steered by A.I. For the first time in history, we literally won’t need a workforce anymore to run the economy.
There is a huge opportunity here to build society from scratch again and to include these groups and give them the opportunity to live meaningful lives.
The opposite is happening, with the help of the same machines that will put 2 billion of us out of our jobs.
The solution offered by the billionaires that own the key to the V.I.P rooms of our economy is introducing a basic universal income (UBI) for this group of obsolete workforce. Ah, yes, and put them on Ocolus and let them play, kill or fight in VR most of the day.
That’s a bad outlook.
The same tech that supports rather dystopian or totalitarian futures, can help support humans in real growth, education, equality, sense-making, decision making, thriving cooperation and eventually, why not, peace.
The choice is ours.
Also published here.