A very distinguished panel (three professors, the chairman of a space resources company, and the president of Estonia) discuss the big coming changes in technology and what that will mean for society in the next decade and a half.
Among the predictions:
– genome editing for disease prevention and human enhancement (big ethical issues: Do we only modify the genes of people who are already born, or also embryos? Do we just select from existing genes, or make deliberate changes? Do parents make these choices, or the government? Do we change how we treat people based on what we know about their genome?)
– cheap and reliable space travel for the extraction of resources
– greater insight into our own selves: the functioning of our individual bodies, our bacterial symbiotes, and the activity of our brains
– digital transformation in business and beyond
– “cognitive assistants” (basically AI PAs)
AI is divided into “narrow” and “general”. General AI (that thinks at an equal or greater level than a human) is decades away – and an authentic threat to human life – but “narrow” AI has a lot of promise to improve human life in the shorter term. (However, there are still the concerns about hacking.)
All of these advances can be seen as software/data problems in some sense, and therefore all of them raise issues about privacy, security and data ownership. If we have more reliance on data, then hackers changing it will have a high impact, such as in health or autonomous vehicles – but if governments try to put the brakes on technological advancement, they risk falling behind, or not solving immediate, solvable issues because of fears of more extreme uses or edge cases. Law in general tends to lag behind technology, and this is a problem – technologists don’t understand the social and legal implications, and lawmakers don’t understand technology. There’s a case for engaging more widely within society to solve these problems. We will need to be more explicit about implicit decisions we have been making.
There’s no built-in guarantee that these advances will benefit people in general rather than the elite. That’s something that needs to come via policy rather than out of the technology itself.
On the upside, we have the opportunity to increase transparency, which fights corruption and improves quality of life for society in general.
There are definite risks (and bad things will inevitably happen), but there are also great opportunities, and the likelihood is that, if done thoughtfully, changes to technology (matched with good policy) will improve our lives. The key thing is: what do we want as a society? And can we adapt successfully to the changes that are coming, as individuals and nations?
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