Humanity needs to simplify the technology and products for our civilization but make them fully scalable and self-replicating. The technologies that we pick to scale need to be ones that we can increase to a thousand times our current levels with manageable pollution and side-effects at those scales.
We will soon have billions or trillions of humanoid robots and they will work in self-replicating factories. The robots will make other robots and be part of a system of machines to make more machines and more factories. Twenty factory doublings means a million times more production. We need to improve planning to factor in massive technological scaling.
We have to close the cycle and make the self-replicating systems fully recyclable and have the waste streams managed.
The humanoid bots and factories need to be transportable via mass produced SpaceX Starships so they can seed mining and production on the Moon, Mars and asteroids. In space and on Mars and asteroids, the technological self-replicating factory seeds need to be improvable/perfectable so that as we can scale they get better so we get a good scaled technology in our solar system.
The technological seeds do not need to be perfect but we should understand the limits and problems with scaling each aspect of the technology. The simpler systems will be easier to model scaling by a million, billion or trillion times. If the systems can self-replicate and double in a year or two years then a million times more can be only 20-40 years away.
Batteries Suitable for Scaling
Sodium ion batteries do not have practical material limits. There is no shortage of salt or soda ash. The United States has about 90% of the world’s readily mined reserves of soda ash. Wyoming has 47 billion tons of mineable soda ash in the Green River basin. There would be hundreds of TWH of power storage from each billion tons of soda ash.
Based on material costs of $4 per kWh there could be $8 to $10 per kWh sodium ion batteries in the future. This would be ten times cheaper than energy storage batteries today.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
What would motivate an AI to do anything but what it is directed to do?
It has no motivation to do anything else.
Oh, I suppose you could have it generate a list of everything it possibly could do, assign a number to each of them, then generate a random number to see what it “wants” to do.
Who would be crazy then? You? Or the AI?
It’s not brawns and brains. It’s brawns, brains, and motivation.
The industrial revolution gave us physical automation, currently we are seeing the entry of cognitive automation, but I have serious doubts that any sane person will ever attempt to automate motivation. We get to stay on top of the pyramid.
This sounds great as long as we put most of it in space. Wiping out the Earth’s natural ecosystems would be a cosmic tragedy.
“…Billions for Everyone…”
That could happen, easily, but if the present trajectory of society continues then the people at the top will own everything, almost do now, and they will kill off everyone else as superfluous. The public plans submitted by the people at the top are awful and distressing, and this is just what they say publically. Who knows what they say in private. Of course, it will not stop there because a vast number of those at the top are psychopaths and they will, as soon as they get rid of the masses, start in on each other. Maybe there will be a few left, but psychopaths are great at getting power but lousy at doing anything worthwhile or continuing civilization, so eventually it will all fall.
[ What’s the value of borders? ]
New laws are coming
1: laws forbidding robots from perform any medical activity
2: laws strictly limiting robotic bodies to NOT look like children
3: laws demanding that everything the robot sees or hears is recorded for possible police investigations
4: laws preventing robots form ‘repairing’ devices without a license
Etc.
The old economy/society will fight against the changes humanoid robots bring
Robots will be game changer. At home they will be able to cook you top notch meal, order ingredients, clean, recycle, sort garbage,.. Things will get way more efficient. Perhaps we are only few years away from that. We will see how Tesla bot will progress. I hope that democracy will become stronger in the next year, technology will progress a lot and wish everyone a good year.
First thing I want my Teslabot roto do is get a job and make me money.
Thank you, that is a nice way to start my day 🙂
Production for production’s sake only IS NOT healthy.
Production to engage people and address human needs IS healthy.
There is a reason the wealthiest nations experience the highest rates of depression and suicide. People need to have a purpose and feel like they are making a difference in this world. Bored, idle populations tend toward unrest, violent protests, and, ultimately, revolutions.
Good point
Good point. How do you think one can maintain purpose in such a world?
Mao Tse Tung thought the same thing and sent his population to be farmers.
Clean living honest country life.
The only downsides were the starvation and destruction of society…
The purpose of technology is to amplify human capabilities. The morality/meaning part of it is your job.
You can adapt, but it takes time.
Many indigenous people suffer from addiction and depression due to lack of purpose. When your culture is based on bare bones survival finding purpose in a materialistic world is very difficult.
Why do we need to work 40 hours to have a house and a car, when 1 hour is enough have a shed with all you need.
AI will make all of us look like indigenous people on welfare.
The question is, can we learn to play again?
I need to point out that an economy billions of times larger with the same population doesn’t mean billions for everybody. More likely it means quadrillions for a tiny minority.
The profits from the means of production go to the owners of the means of production, after all.
To be billions for everybody, you’d need everybody to have ownership of some of that self-reproducing industrial capacity.
That said, self-reproduction IS the way of the future, we just have to watch how we manage it.
Look at the extreme povertydata over time, and you will see something different.
https://ourworldindata.org/poverty
There will off course be people immensely more wealth than others, but what you say does in reality not make much sense as long as long as the producers of goods and services must have customers with money to sell too, so it will only be natural to increase salaries, and give stock options.
Only hardcore psychopaths are so crazy they will keep x amount of billion people in leashes – those situations has a tendency to end in a bloody revolution.
And then you have taxes…
So an abundant future – as long as we humans are still in control – seems inevitable.
But, I still think that the newest versions of Ferraris new intergalactic superfastspaceship will be something only a few people can afford…
How to assure that everyone has a fair share of ownership of the means of production is the important question.
In this case the critical means of production are IP. Who owns the Neural Networks and the data they are trained on is what’s important. It’s also pretty obviously something that is the equal common heritage of humanity or at least all the people who are citizens of the country with the property laws.
The closest historical ideas for this are the thread including Henry George – except “Land” is a tranche of IP, particularly Neural Networks and the data they are trained with. IP along with say Carbon Credits, EM spectrum, etc are a species of “Land” in the Georgist sense.
Of course the solution is not a Land Value Tax but giving everybody an equal ownership share and an equal share of the revenue/rent generated by the this wealth.
People who create IP including NN would still get an up front share too but so would the pool and complete ownership would revert to everyone eventually.
This assures everyone shares the rapidly expanding new wealth and that there are still plentiful rewards for market forces that drive the expansion.
I’m always skeptical when someone says everyone will have equal ownership because the tragedy of the commons is a real thing and when no one owns something, ususally nothing gets done. However, I did find your idea that we would reward people (producers) for the original ideas (IP), but over time we could find a way to revert the value of those ideas and spread the wealth. This would incent producers to move from idea to product (something that the profit motive does now) quickly, but maybe protect against giant corporation owninig all of the IP. I am a straight up capitalist, but recognize that as we replace human labor with machine labor we also have to come up with some system to replace wages in a world where human labor has very little value.
What will be stopping everybody from purchasing stock in the industrial companies?
The fact that they no longer have jobs or an income because the robots have displaced everyone?
I don’t necessarily believe that we’ll get to this scenario, but the self-replicating (and supposedly self-operating) factories imply this.
Companies issue stock to raise money. If they don’t need to raise money, they don’t typically issue it, and so you can’t buy it.
Even a lot of companies now recycle earnings internally, instead of issuing stock for capital expansions, which is why so few stocks these days actually earn dividends.
But if you have self-reproducing machinery, your capital expands without significant expenditure of money, so the need to raise it to expand goes away.
Ergo, this stock will not be available to buy, absent some significant change to tax laws and the laws governing corporations.
It will take considerable thought and effort to see us through to a future where the self-reproducing means of production are widely owned. It’s not going to happen on its own.
The trend has been for successful companies to buy back stock rather than issue dividends since this results in non-taxable unrealized capital gains rather than taxable income. Successful AI/robotics companies would be enormously profitable from replacing human labor and have no need for stock sales. For the same reasons Musk has been frustrated with Tesla as a public company they might even choose to restructure and go private.
I completely agree that on their own, these technologies will not result in widespread ownership or wealth.
This is an uninspired thinking.What we what we need Is Affordable and easy production for self-sufficiency. The big scale economy has disempowered us. we need to go back to Living in egalitarian, participatory And flourishing self-sufficient communities.
There never was such a thing to go “back” to. Small communities always existed on the edge of extinction, completely vulnerable to attacks. Only large scale economies ever produced peace and prosperity for significant areas and numbers of people.
Many people still think everything will go all right with artificial created entities. The thing is they will be orders or magnitude smarter than any of us and the smartest and most powerful usually dominate and they are the masters.
May be they will ask to kill everybody one day , we will be outnumbered…