Ask A Genius 154 – ‘When is the Future Going to Get Here?’
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/20
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Rick Rosner: We were talking about when the future is going to get here. We talk about the future a lot without pinning down when it will happen and what it will do. I consider the election disrupted by the future. That is, disrupted by forces that have never played so large a role in an election, one thing is that actual jobs lost to AI and to robotics. I saw a statistic yesterday that for every robot in a factory, then you cost 6.2 human jobs.
People like to say that we’ve had increasing automation for 3 centuries, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and people found work after each disruption. I believe that is a harder case to make now. There are probably millions of people in this country who have lost jobs to automation. They are pissed off. People also lost jobs to economic cycles, to offshoring and outsourcing, but automation puts constant pressure on the job market.
It squeezes it down and down and down. Those pissed off people and other pissed off people have been manipulated via computer hacking of information that generate social media bots. They have been manipulated into mistrusting longstanding American institutions. Most prominently, most importantly, the media; so this is a trend that may have shown up in previous elections, but it exploded in this election.
Senate is just beginning to have hearings on exactly how much we were fucked over by Russia. We have another national election coming up in 2018, which also includes all sorts of state elections. There is no guarantee. In fact, there’s no guarantee that we will be able to fight off that same electronic manipulation of people with propaganda and bots filling social media with bullshit.
In fact, you can pretty much guarantee that that’s going to happen. There are elections coming up in France that Russia is trying to mess with. Russia is trying to mess with the alliances in Western Europe such as NATO. He influenced Brexit. Russia’s efforts to destabilize Western democracies and will continue to be fairly successful. So that’s one form of futuristic disruption that is already here.
Other forms of disruption include a bunch of effects of vastly improved medicine. That within 20 years not only will the genome be entirely figured out – that is, say 90% of the effects of manipulating the various genes in a human genome will be known – along with a lot of other potential feedback loops in the human body. Living things live and move through the environment and have flexibility to deal with various conditions of life using feedback in the body.
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