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?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i19zr_nisKk&feature=share

Jobs that are likely to go away in the next 10-20 years: the kind of routine industrial and administrative jobs that our current education system has traditionally been geared towards. 

Skills that are likely to still be in demand: caring for others, communicating with others, creativity – all of which our current education system is bad at teaching, but all of which can be taught as skills. 

In the longer term, more and more jobs will disappear, and we may end up in a scenario where income and work have to be decoupled. In the short term, the need is to structure the economy so that people are supported in transitioning from one type of employment to another (rather than try to “protect the past from the future” and prevent industries from changing – which is impractical). This may involve increasing the flexibility of work. Some people prefer greater flexibility to higher income.

There are societal choices to be made, though, to shift from the automation process benefiting a small sector of society rather than the whole of society (as is largely the case at the moment). Having some degree of security (social safety net) increases the likelihood that people will take the risk to be entrepreneurial. Current incentives reward businesses for not employing people (with less complicated and lower taxes); this needs to change.

There are also plenty of opportunities for automation and technology to make existing work easier and more valuable. 

There are known negative effects of loss of employment in a society or community, but some of the speakers here argue that those partly stem from the fact that employment is considered the norm; that if there was a shift of perspective, they might be mitigated. Sharing out the available work more evenly, so that people get more leisure but there is still high employment, is another approach. Obviously, this only works well if everyone is still getting a livable income. 

Bottom line: technology will continue to disrupt the world of work, but it’s our choice what that disruption looks like. We can (collectively) choose that the benefits are distributed throughout society, if we want to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnNs2MYVQoE&feature=share

Intelligent dinosaurs are among us.

Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger

The past few years have had a great deal of research showing extraordinary cognitive abilities in some birds – especially corvids (crows, ravens, jackdaws, and the like) and parrots, who can solve complex puzzles, understand and synthesize language at the level of simple syntax, and display an understanding of object permanence typically reached by humans around age two.

Up to now, there has been a good deal of argument that these are limited tactical skills, usable only in specific contexts but not in general. However, a new review article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, collecting the results of this wide range of research, seems to show fairly definitively that this is not the case: the same kinds of cognitive abilities show up, over and over in these species, no matter what context they find themselves in. These birds have intelligence comparable to those of some apes.

What’s most fascinating about this is that birds’ brains are very little like primates’. Most visibly, they have no neocortex at all – that being the large, highly folded section of the brain which we use for most of our complex thinking. Instead, they seem to do their thinking in the pallium, a part of the brain common to almost all vertebrates, but somehow developed differently in these species.

This could well imply that complex intelligence evolved separately in birds and in mammals, not coming from any shared origin. This would suggest that, like vision or locomotion, abstract thought is a powerful general adaptation which may arise in any number of ways.

Among the corvidae, the pressure leading to this has fairly clearly been that of being clever scavengers – not too different from the pressures which likely led to our own development of such tools. This combination of intelligence and opportunism has also made them highly successful in a human-dominated world: the ecosystem we create is full of tasty treats. 

via Pratik Mukherjee 

http://neurosciencenews.com/bird-ape-intelligence-3801/

Takeaways from this:

1. Turns out work that’s traditionally done by women – like caregiving and education – is a lot harder to automate than, say, being a lawyer or a doctor.

Implication I’m taking from that: the future of employment may include (unless we take steps to structure it otherwise) women being most of the workforce, and furthermore, being forced to work by economic pressure. 

2. Women very much need to be a part of designing AI, or we won’t get AI that works for everyone. (Which makes it even more notable that all of these experts, and most of the audience, are men.)

3. A lot of current AI research is focussed on improving life – finding ways to prevent accidents or make specialist medical care available to more people, for example. The “scary” part is further in the future. 

4. Intriguing idea: human working memory artificially enhanced so that we’re capable of working on more complex problems with our own intelligence. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKsXpLrJPoo&feature=share