Our Future as a Species Going deep today

Nothing changed for our species and our way of living for centuries.  Yes, through art etc.  But we were still muddling around with horse and cart.  Medieval ways of farming etc. Primitive health ideas and we were always allowing ourselves, mostly through fear, to continually be shaped by some kind of religiosity

It began to change around 150 years ago.  We became scientists and technocrats.  Industry, War machines began to change etc. Electricity. Telecommunications so on.

Now we are on the cusp of making over everything and creating an entirely different world unlike anything we have ever known as humanity.  Of course, it began with computing and the internet.

Great power is now upon our species which have been here for about 300.000 years.

42,000 yeas or there about, there was great qualitative shift.  We went from hunter gathers and cave painting, to high mathematics and high art.

That was the first shift. Give or take a couple or so thousand years later the industrial revolution, the second shift.  The first and second world wars bought us high science and eventually with the discovery of the silicon chip the third shift.  Technology and science married in a way that would have been unthinkable to our great grandparents. In my lifetime I have seen the evolution for electric tube driven wireless transmissions/ radio to a cell phone in my handbag to write texts and send photos out into cyberspace.

Suddenly all is about to change big time within the next 30 or so years.

In our past changes have been so incremental they have come upon us gradually.  However, this is not gradual.  In the last twenty years the cell phone has now evolved into a small smart computer that can hold all your personal data etc.    Tracks my shopping habits and if you don’t switch it of it is listening to you.  I kid you not. Proven fact. When you use your default settings, everything you say may be recorded through your device’s onboard microphone. Our phones routinely collect our voice data, store it in a distant server, and use it for marketing purposes. Google it.  It will chill you how much we are being monitored.  Nothing to do with passwords or privacy. It is all there being checked on your phone.

Twenty or so years is all it took.

These changes are now and rapid.  Like a light switch.  We are witnessing the digitization of everything on the planet. It will bring massive power to the moneyed elite. Banking institutions especially, there is no privacy. That is already happening and the algorithms that follow us around through our phones, our tablets our laptops are run by robots.

There will wonderful spin offs from where all this is headed.  Read for instance just a few examples of a few of the benefits and there will be plenty. Science Focus has a big list.  It actually is a great site.

But make no mistake. Artificial intelligence is impacting the future of virtually every industry and every human being. Artificial intelligence has acted as the main driver of emerging technologies like big data, robotics and IT, and it will continue to act as a technological innovator for the foreseeable future.

Our Future as a Species Going deep today  Long Ramble if you can be bothered

Nothing changed for our species and our way of living for centuries.  Yes, through art etc.  But we were still muddling around with horse and cart.  Medieval ways of farming etc. Primitive health ideas and we were always allowing ourselves, mostly through fear, to continually be shaped by some kind of religiosity

It began to change around 150 years ago.  We became scientists and technocrats.  Industry, War machines began to change etc. Electricity. Telecommunications so on.

Now we are on the cusp of making over everything and creating an entirely different world unlike anything we have ever known as humanity.  Of course, it began with computing and the internet.

Great power is now upon our species which have been here for about 300.000 years.

42,000 yeas or there about, there was great qualitative shift.  We went from hunter gathers and cave painting, to high mathematics and high art.

That was the first shift. Give or take a couple or so thousand years later the industrial revolution, the second shift.  The first and second world wars bought us high science and eventually with the discovery of the silicon chip the third shift.  Technology and science married in a way that would have been unthinkable to our great grandparents. In my lifetime I have seen the evolution for electric tube driven wireless transmissions/ radio to a cell phone in my handbag to write texts and send photos out into cyberspace.

Suddenly all is about to change big time within the next 30 or so years.

In our past changes have been so incremental they have come upon us gradually.  However, this is not gradual.  In the last twenty years the cell phone has now evolved into a small smart computer that can hold all your personal data etc.    Tracks my shopping habits and if you don’t switch it of it is listening to you.  I kid you not. Proven fact. When you use your default settings, everything you say may be recorded through your device’s onboard microphone. Our phones routinely collect our voice data, store it in a distant server, and use it for marketing purposes. Google it.  It will chill you how much we are being monitored.  Nothing to do with passwords or privacy. It is all there being checked on your phone.

Twenty or so years is all it took.

These changes are now and rapid.  Like a light switch.  We are witnessing the digitization of everything on the planet. It will bring massive power to the moneyed elite. Banking institutions especially, there is no privacy. That is already happening and the algorithms that follow us around through our phones, our tablets our laptops are run by robots.

There will wonderful spin offs from where all this is headed.  Read for instance just a few examples of a few of the benefits and there will be plenty. Science Focus has a big list.  It actually is a great site.

But make no mistake. Artificial intelligence is impacting the future of virtually every industry and every human being. Artificial intelligence has acted as the main driver of emerging technologies like big data, robotics and IT, and it will continue to act as a technological innovator for the foreseeable future.

I will finish with this quote from the Smithsonian from 2017 no less.

In just the last few years, “machine learning” has come to seem like the new path forward. Algorithms, freed from human programmers, are training themselves on massive data sets and producing results that have shocked even the optimists in the field. Earlier this year, two AIs—one created by the Chinese company Alibaba and the other by Microsoft—beat a team of two-legged competitors in a Stanford reading-comprehension test. The algorithms “read” a series of Wikipedia entries on things like the rise of Genghis Khan and the Apollo space program and then answered a series of questions about them more accurately than people did. One Alibaba scientist declared the victory a “milestone.”

That scares me.  What does the future hold for my grandkids that know no difference?

 

The fourth shift has already begun.