a quick review of (near future) disruptions and innovations

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: Technology is neither good nor bad nor is it neutral. (It certainly can’t be uninvented.) THE FUTURE (AND|OF) TECHNOLOGY by @patricksavalle

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:Technology is neither good nor bad

nor is it neutral.(It certainly can’t be uninvented.)

THE FUTURE (AND|OF) TECHNOLOGYby @patricksavalle

Why has human progress ground to a halt?

http://aeon.co/magazine/science/why-has-human-progress-ground-to-a-halt/

Entering a dark age of innovation

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7616-entering-a-

dark-age-of-innovation.html

The great stagnation

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/01/growth_2

THE DARK AGES OF INNOVATIONWe were promised flying cars, all we got was 140 chars. And batteries everywhere.

3D PRINTING

Create objects by printing them, just input a design and raw materials.

Status: typical technological innovation that will get better, faster, cheaper

exponentially

Holy grail: Star Trek replicator, instantiation of living things, synthetic

morphogenesis

Related technologies: additive manufacturing, distributed

manufacturing.

BIONICS(mind-controlled) exoskeletons, prosthetics, body-parts and super-senses.

The realm of engineering and as such will see the same exponential progress (3D-printing, materials, electronics etc).

Status: successful on disabled people but won’t be popular among healthy people soon because mechanics still very inferior to organics.

H+ (transhumanism or ‘the augmented human’) very real and much more likely than singularity

THE INTERNET OF THINGS

Everything connected to the internet, like a bionic layer over planet earth.

From large industrial machines to MEMS (micro electromechanical sensors).

Typical, predictable technological innovation: will get bigger, faster, cheaper.

Privacy issues.

Status: unstoppable avalanche -> think years, not decades

PLATFORM IS THE NEW FACTORY

A platform is an organization that crowdsources its resources and coordinates their collaboration.

Extremely scalable. Extremely lightweight: only a business core.

Problems: single point of control, potentially a tool for ‘enslaving’ and dronifying many by few.

Status: very mature concept, implementations resisted by ‘something’

http://airbnb.comhttp://uber.com

THE COLLABORATIVE ECONOMYAn economy in which machines,

algorithms and people are producing and sharing things without much bureaucracy or central planning.

An ecosystem of platforms.

Task-based instead of job-based.

Like the industrial economy, it too will be owned by a few people.

Status: taking over right now, resisted big time.

DISTRIBUTED COLLABORATIONAny time, any place, any context collaboration without central planning. Economic freedom.

Platform-based creation, decentrally coordinated using stigmergic principles.

‘Just add value, you will be rewarded’

Status: immature technology and inflexible existing H&R, fiscal regulations are limiting

success. Status quo situation for last decade.

https://github.comhttps://assembly.com

https://mobbr.com

THE BLOCKCHAIN

The decentralized ledger. Eliminates the need for trusted or intermediate parties when transacting.

Blockchains enable property (incl. money) to be

exchanged and allocated instantly, undisputable, secure and internetted.

Makes any property ‘cash’ property.

“On the blockchain, nobody knows you’re a fridge”, allows machines and algorithms to become

economic actors.

Status: will be huge, sooner than later, but not on monetary applications.

DECENTRALISED AUTONOMOUS CORPORATIONS

Algorithmic companies that run in a blockchain. Decentralized. No single point of failure, control or censorship.

Bitcoin-network itself was the first ever robocorp.

Solves the ‘single point of control’ problem that platforms can have.

Banks, payment-systems, energy grids, governments, transportation, cloud-services, exchanges, markets, etc.

Status: first prototypes up-and-running won’t take-off yet.

https://erisindustries.comhttps://lazooz.org

Programs that are ‘intelligent’ (confusion right there: intelligent does not mean autonomous or sentient).

Experts agree ‘human AI’ not anytime soon. No, Musk, Gates and Hawkin are not experts.

‘By 2029 no computer or machine intelligence will have passed the Turing test’http://longbets.org/1/

Status: very successful at specialized tasks yet no ‘human-like’ AI anytime soon.

Holy grail: emotions, creativity and self-awareness

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Organisms created to genetic specification.

Status: overhyped, little progress since the disappointing Human Genome Project. Big ethical issues.

Genetic determinism still just an idea. Genetics stumbling from one failing hypothesis to another.

Being able to decode or edit a genome does not mean understanding it. At all.

Greedy investment climate because of big, patentable promises.DESIGNER BABIES

SINGULARITY

The end of the anthropocene, the beginning of the mekhanocene.

‘Machine making man obsolete.’

Not a technology but an event, expected around 2040.

‘The church of Kurzweil’

Status: more a meme than a probable event, has become a license to

limitless exaggerate human progress.

GLOBAL DECENTRALISED AUTONOMY

A global base layer of decentralized autonomous platforms that automates and democratizes social utility and service functions, such as governments, banks, payment-systems, energy grids, health-care, transportation, cloud-services, exchanges, markets, etc.

Based on open-source software, distributed collaboration and blockchain technology.

The great equalizer.

Status: technological already possible, but will be resisted by ‘the powers that be’

BIOMIMCIRY, BECAUSE BIOLOGY IS THE ULTIMATE TECHNOLOGY

Invented 3D printing billion years ago (morphogenesis). Has been running an internet for millions of years (mycelia).

Using quantum technology for millions of years (bird navigation). Etc.

A human cell has 10 billion moving parts, more complicated than a modern nuclear submarine. The body has 370 trillion such cells.

Science not very successful in understanding nature because Nature (anti-chaos, chaos) doesn’t fit the mechanistic paradigm.

Nature’s most common trick (self-organization) has no scientific explanation.

Nature is the master of exponentiality.

For solutions, always look to nature first! Bio-mimicry.

THE BATTLE FOR CONTROLMORE DECENTRALISING TECHNOLOGY THAN EVER THREATENING THE ELITE

centralized vs. distributed, control vs. autonomy, slavery vs. freedom, 1% vs. 99%

THE SCIENCE DELUSION

The science crisis: our clockwork universe is broken.

The current scientific paradigm of determinism, reductionism and mechanism has proven it’s worth but is also failing us.

Dogma and consensus have taken over in climate science, economics, medicine, genetics and many other sciences. Impossible to produces true theories (predicting models).

The problem: science has no fundamental understanding of and no mathematical frameworks for some of the most common phenomena in nature such as anti-chaos (self-organization)

Status: mankind will eventual linger into the age of holistic science but dogma and believe are powerful innovation absorbers.

ANTI-GRAVITY DEVICES

Manipulating gravity like we can manipulate electromagnetism and light.

To be able to create, shield, store, emit, reverse etc. gravity.

Gravity is not described by quantum theory unlike all other fundamental forces. Only scientific theory is in classical physics not particle physics.

Status: waiting for a very fundamental scientific breakthrough

‘Electrogravitics’

OVERUNITY ENERGY DEVICES

The absolute holy grail of innovation and technology: devices that produce more energy than they use by drawing from ‘the zero-point field’.

Limitless, free energy.

‘The legacy of Nikolai Tesla’

Status: still very much in the realm of myth and conspiracy theory.

‘Proven in hundreds of laboratories around the world’ -- Dr. Brian O’Leary, Ph.D, scientist, author, Princeton/Cornell physics professor, and former NASA astronaut.