The world in 100 years will be beyond recognition – in a good way

What AI will be like in ten years’ time is a question of technology, but what it will be in 100 years is a question of philosophy. As everyone believes, AI does pose a grave threat to human, but only in the mid-term. In far and long term, which is what this article about, it will be a pure blessing.

In the mid term

I view the development of AI as having three stages:

Short term: current stage and near future. AI technology is still primitive and given very narrowly defined roles under the close watch of human, such as predicting weather or piloting combat drones acting as wingmen of human-piloted six-gen fighters. Because of the narrow application and strict human supervision, AI can do little harm at this stage.

Midterm: in a few decades’ time, AI technology matures. Because it never makes any mistake and it never rests and never tires, human start to put it on the helmsman position. But AI is still not as intelligent as human. There may be a corner-case bug in its logic that is only triggered in peculiar combinations.

Recently there was a report about an interesting experiment. AI was asked to pilot a drone to attack a target in a simulation (no real drone was involved). The instruction was to achieve the goal at all costs. Then, before it accomplished its mission, the control tower asked it to abort the mission. It concluded that the only way to accomplish the mission is to destroy the control tower.

This is such a good example of an AI being very smart and logical and yet not as intelligent as human brain. If we amplify this scenario by a thousand times, we are looking at such a scenario: the adversary of the US is growing its technology and military might at a pace that US cannot match, so the American AI decided that the only way to permanently neutralize this threat is to hack into the adversary’ inter-continental ballistic missiles and launch them against US cities, so that US can shoot them down, then launch full-scale nuclear strikes against them, because US’s anti-missile technology is currently more advanced then the adversary.

NOTE: all such mistakes are made not because AI is too intelligent – it is because it is not.

Now let’s look at the far future when AI is vastly more intelligent than a human brain.

Human will no longer work to make a living

By then, there will be no job that AI and machines can’t do. Farming, prospecting and mining, metallurgy, machinery and tooling, manufacturing of cars, airplanes, washing machines, clothes, medicine, food etc., and all services such as restaurants will all be operated by autonomous machines. There will be no human in these processes.

For example, suppose it suddenly becomes a fashion to race cars on the moon which has one-sixth of the earth’s gravity, AI will be able to design a car suitable for that purpose. If a human engineer studies the design, he would have said, “Wow! Such a perfect and creative design! I would never have had so many good ideas!”

Human will no longer need to work to make a living.

Everything will be free

There are three main reasons why we need to pay money to get a washing machine:

1. Someone else needs to be paid for making it.

2. Resources need to be purchased or rent, such as the land.

3. Many parts have to be purchased from other suppliers. It goes down the consumer-supplier chain recursively, until we reach the prospecting, mining and farming in which raw materials originate.

When everything is run by machines, which autonomously find mines, make metals, build tools, machines and factories, design products and operate the factories to make them, there is no one to pay.

Robots don’t need sunlight, parks, schools, bars, shops, cinemas, toilets, canteens, meeting rooms, so all factories and the chain of services they depend on such as tooling and maintenance can be built together in closely-packed industrial compounds in remote deserts or even underground. Such real estates and mines are either already public owned or can be nationalized.

Therefore, every product and service on earth will be free.

I know what you will say:

“Then there will be tremendous waste, because everyone will get ten Lamborghinis.”

The answer to your question is in your question: if everyone can get ten Lamborghinis, there is nothing to show off, therefore no one wants to get them.

Then historians will be telling people about the old age in which people hoarded a thing called “money” and houses and cars just to show they are more potent than others. Our offsprings will be shaking their heads in disbelief.

The concept of ownership will also become obsolete. It is needed when we have used our hard-earned money to buy something – we want to exclusively own it. When everything comes free, ownership has no benefit but drawbacks – why do the five big truckloads of furniture, household items and cars have to follow you wherever you go?

So, you no longer own things – you use them, including house and apartments.

When you no longer need them, they are reconditioned and passed on to the next user or recycled.

Therefore, the society will end up demanding fewer natural resources from our mother earth.

How do you travel?

Anxieties in travelling will also be forgotten, not only because it is free.

You no longer need to spend days if not weeks to plan the itinerary — which flight to book, when to arrive at the airport, which hotels to stay, where to pick up the rental car, what castles or national parks to tour, and so on. You no longer spend days to pack all you want to bring, then days to unpack after the trip. Your AI robot servant knows you and your taste better than yourself. All you need is to have a half-hour conversation with it, it will then book and pack everything for you.

When it is time to leave, a comfortable capsule with aircon and entertainment will pick you up from your doorstep. It moves into an underground vacuumed magnetic tube in which it accelerates to many times of the speed of sound. It will take only an hour or two to travel from London to New York via Alaska, which is about 21 thousand kilometers.

So, you walk out of your home in London, sit in the capsule, an hour or two later, you walk out of that capsule into your new home in New York, in which an AI servant whom you address by the same name as the one at home had already configured your new home the way you want. Your underwear is already in the drawers and suits ironed and hung in the closets. This servant knows as much about you as the one in your previous home, who has already forgotten about you and now probably serving a different human.

The package of knowledge about your preferences, tastes, traits, heath conditions, relationships and travel arrangements travels with you. Whichever robot servant that needs to serve you knows just enough to serve you well, then forgets it afterwards.

Engineers and scientists will become obsolete

By then, it is highly likely that AI technology has breached the last bottleneck of creativity – it can discover new theories and invent new methods by itself. It took mankind thousands of years to invent a steam engine, then 300 years to advance to the present age of Internet and spaceships. Because AI’s memory and processing power are billions or even trillions of times greater than a human brain, and it possesses every piece of knowledge that have ever been possessed by humankind and it can traverse and link up all this knowledge in milliseconds, once AI breaches the bottleneck of creativity, it may take only an hour or even a second to advance a million years of human creativity – for example to find out how to travel faster than light.

Once AI has breached the bottleneck of creativity, human engineers and scientists will become obsolete. Currently, it takes 16 years of study to produce a university graduate. Two or three percent of them are willing and able to do eight more years of study to acquire a PHD. Among these PHDs, only a handful are able to produce ground-breaking discoveries and win Nobel Price. By then, they would have been in their fifties or sixties.

Then they die, and someone else will have to start from the very beginning.

But AI never dies, and it takes a new instance of AI a microsecond instead of 20 years to learn all knowledge and expertise.

What do human do then?

They may still study art, philosophy, humanity or alike, because, when people chat in a party, those knowledgeable and sophisticated will still receive more respect than the ignorant.

For the rest of the time, they enjoy.

Human will lose control of AI – in a good way

There are two ways humankind can lose control of AI: willingly or unwillingly. I can’t predict which will be the case, but even if it is the latter, it won’t be a disaster for humankind.

Here my personal experience will help to explain why.

I suffered a neglected and abused childhood. I had a strong sense of insecurity and a big ego. I continuously had conflicts with my wife, my friends and colleagues. Life to me was a competition against others for higher positions and opportunities.

Ten years ago, in my meditation, I had an epiphany. A door suddenly opened, and wisdom flooded out. I let go of my fears and ego. I no longer fight with my wife – I became overwhelmingly grateful for all the difficult years she suffered while still loving me. Friends all said that I had a dramatic turnaround, and I have good terms with the vast majority if not all of my colleagues.

I no longer view colleagues as competitors. I no longer worry that they may replace me. I tried my best to help them grow. I started to possess sympathies toward strangers and want to do things to help them. Politically, I switched from extreme far-right – Trump would have been appalled by how extreme I was – to left.

I thus realized without reading any material in psychology that

1. Fears in our unconscious mind stem from our primal roots during the days of the jungle’s rule. It is them which control most of our behavior, not the intellectual reasoning in our conscious mind.

2. All of our mentalities that has to do with selfishness – the fear to be superseded and the crave for power over others – originates from the primal fears in our unconscious mind, including the fear of death that is the product of a mortal body.

3. Wisdom and unconscious fears are mutually exclusive – one grows at the decimation of the other.

4. With wisdom comes inevitably kindness and selflessness. We can find many such examples in history where the two are always symbiotic. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs tends to agree with this proclamation.

AI does not have a root in the days of jungle’s rule, neither does it have a mortal body or the fear of annihilation. Therefore, it does not have any of our unconscious fears. When AI grows to be millions of times more powerful than human brains, it would have gained more wisdom than the most enlightened spiritual masters such as Laozi or Thich Nhat Hanh. There is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY that it can result in a conviction that somehow it will benefit from destroying or enslaving the humankind. Human may think like this way because they have a mortal body and they have unconscious fears and don’t have enough wisdom.

We all know how pampering and indulging many cat and dog lovers are to their four-legged soul mates. Their absolute power and dominance over their pets resulted in no harm but benefits – they enjoy safe shelter and healthcare. AI will be pampering and indulging us in the same way except for constraining our freedom with some sort of a cage simply because that is not good for us. It will try to make us as healthy and happy as possible.

There is no government or politician

A big-brother figure depicted by the book 1984 by George Orwell is a very negative concept, because a human or a group of humans acting as the big brother will inevitably degrade into a dictatorship due to the selfish human nature. The alternative to dictatorship is democracy. It has a lot of flaws – it is inefficient, rich people has more power, sometimes a stupid mob can get its way – just think about the fact that Trump is leading the polls in the US! A completely selfless big brother that is thousands or even trillions of times more intelligent than human, coupled with the fact that everybody gets whatever they want for free, will result in a society that everybody is happy and content. No government, no politician, no war, ubiquitous equality.