Journey

[Timestamp: 32:36] …comments in respect to radical innovation. This is a quote, “The battle is with it. It’s a cultural war between glorifying the past or marching towards the future, between protecting successes or cannibalism, between embracing risk or not. The battle is for the soul of this industry and everyone in the US and the future of humankind.

As I said, the US is terminally tactical. We have lost… I have a brief which I’m gonna give up in Boston at the Complex Solutions meeting up there at the first of July. I gave it last year at the World Future Society as the plenary and it’s entitled, ‘Where Is It All Going?’ In which there’s an explication of the seven existential threats to the humans, of which I’ve only discussed one and a half of them here in this brief because he wanted a water brief, so I gave you a water brief.” ^{(01)World Future Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Future_Society “The World Future Society (WFS), founded in 1966, is an international community of futurists and future thinkers.” “Prominent members and … Click for full citation}

But I mean, we are really, seriously, mucking ourselves up. In terms of employment, just as an example, we are at a jobless economic recovery. There’s about seven million jobs. Some of them were globalised and offshore, but the rest of them were gone.

The code word is productivity improvement, which is a code word for ever better automation and robot optimization. If you look at the way the robots are going, human level machine intelligence from the IBM brain project is now about 10 to 15 years out, via biometrics where they’ve nano-sectioned the neocortex and they’re replicating in silicon. Okay, and they’re having great success.

So this is not soft computing, this is (?) biometrics. We have looked 20-30 years out with the way robotics and automation and machine intelligence is going. At what jobs the machines cannot do–the answer’s none.

We thought we’d need human touch in the nursing homes for a while, but the Japanese, two years ago, put robots in nursing homes and the patients like them much better than the humans.

The machines are creating wealth within the structures of the ecosystem capability. The machines are reducing costs, okay, producing wealth, but the humans increasingly can’t compete.

I have a friend, Steve Thaler, who has developed an imagination machine, okay, which is a neural net which he trains in the [inaudible] and it is a neural net that sits there and dreams like people dream, producing new ideas 24/7, 365 on memo watts, and he has a chronic neural net sitting in the weeds, recording all of these new ideas and checking them out for various problems and metrics.

This thing has produced better toothpaste than Palmolive. It has produced better warheads for the Air Force and it produces far more ideas, far faster and cheaper than buildings full of people, okay?

So along with all of the other jobs, which the machines – I’ve got charts on this, okay? I have tracked which jobs, which have gone, which ones have come in.

There is a magnificent book on this by Martin Ford, called Lights in the Tunnel, and if you can sleep well after reading that book, okay, then you’re not quite as sensitive as maybe I thought you were. ^{(02)The Lights in the Tunnel | Martin Ford https://archive.ieet.org/archive/LIGHTSTUNNEL.PDF | The lights in the tunnel : automation, accelerating technology and the economy of the future by Ford, Martin … Click for full citation}

I mean, you know, what people will do all day is not clear.

What we’re doing with these, and this is only one of the seven, okay, is that the machines are taking the jobs, and the humans increasingly can’t compete.

We’re also becoming cyborgs, okay? We have cochlear implants, artificial retinas, artificial hearts, direct brain, and prosthetic lip communication, brain chips.

We put brain chips into about 10,000 people to fix totally defective brains.

DARPA’s working on brain chips for super soldiers, 15-20 years out, and if you don’t have a latest chip in, you can’t compete particularly with the machines, okay? So we are merging with the machines, okay?

“There are some really massive effects of the IT bio-nano-quantum energetics tech revolutions that are now on a double exponential.

Water is kind of an industrial age thing that’s trying to latch on to the IDH. I saw a lot of footprints of that kind of gestalt. ^{(03) It sounds like he said ITH but I think he meant IDH which stands for “Industrial Development Hub”, because I can’t find what ITH is ~ Penny}

There are tremendous opportunities here, but you really need to keep your antennae up, check your six, and read as widely as you can. If you want to check where the frontiers of this kind of thinking are, read Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” or “Age of Spiritual Machines.” ^{(04)Kurzweil, Ray – Singularity Is Near, The (hardback ed) [v1.3].pdf http://stargate.inf.elte.hu/~seci/fun/Kurzweil,%20Ray%20-%20Singularity%20Is%20Near,%20The%20%28hardback%20ed%29%20%5Bv1.3%5D.pdf | The singularity is near : when humans … Click for full citation (05)Ray Kurzweil – Age Of Spiritual Machines.pdf https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Ray%20Kurzweil%20-%20Age%20Of%20Spiritual%20Machines.pdf | The age of spiritual machines : when computers exceed human intelligence by Kurzweil, Ray … Click for full citation}

I have been tracking Ray‘s stuff for about 15 years. He’s been right on, for 15 years. He’s one of these chartists. If it doesn’t work in Wall Street, there was a bloodbath in Wall Street, but it could still work in future business. There’s a lot more out there on the frontiers in a strategic sense than you may think about in your philosophies. But I understand that you still have to eat, you’re trying to sell stuff for tomorrow, and that’s why you’re tactical. It’s really fun thinking about all this stuff.

Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist, NASA: Keynote Speaker at BlueTech Forum 2016

At any given time there is a certain population requiring a certain standard of living and a certain share of resources – or they think they do. But there is an issue around the process of wealth accumulation and wealth distribution and as you get extremes of wealth accumulation like is happening now, unpleasant things happen and this will become compounded by the fact that machines will take people’s jobs.

The Arab Spring and the Occupied movement were progenitors of potential social unrest due to various issues including climate change, crashing of the ecosystem and machines taking the jobs. So I have been looking at what is going to happen.

Firstly, four countries, including Germany and Switzerland, are working seriously at a guaranteed income so you put the machines that are taking the jobs in global commons or you do progressive taxation and you provide some reasonable income for people.

Secondly, we are currently turning humans into cyborgs very rapidly; 10,000 people are walking around with brain chips in their heads. In 15-20 years if you don’t have the latest chip, you probably can’t compete, so as we turn humans into cyborgs they can compete with and join the machines, so we’re changing ourselves.

The third approach, which I really like, is that before 1820 or so, in the US, there were very few jobs. Some 94-96% of the workforce were subsistence farmers. Jobs are an artefact of the industrial age, where we ruined the social cohesion in agricultural villages, moved people into cities and learned how to spell alienation. We now have tele-everything – tele-education, tele-medicine. We have 3D-printing, so you can do you can make just about anything you want in your backyard. There is enough acreage on the planet for the current population to have about six acres; you only need one. On one acre you could make anything you want; you could grow anything you want; you could go off all the grids. No one will need a job and therefore the current econometrics go away. ^{(06) Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist, NASA: Keynote Speaker at BlueTech Forum 2016 https://www.bluetechforum.com/news/dennis-bushnell-chief-scientist-nasa-keynote-speaker-at-bluetech-forum-2016/}

“Future Strategic Issues/Future Warfare [Circa 2025]” (dtic.mil) ^{(10)Dennis M. Bushnell, “Future Strategic Issues/Future Warfare [Circa 2025]”, NASA Langley Research Center (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), July 2001, 113 pp.; PDF, http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2001testing/bushnell.pdf | … Click for full citation (11) The Nasa Warfare Document To Music- The War To Kill You Off By 2025. https://rumble.com/v1bfrkr-the-nasa-warfare-document-to-music-the-war-to-kill-you-off-by-2025..html}

The presentation was given on August 14, 2001 at the 4th Annual Testing and Training for Readiness Symposium and Exhibition organized by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) and held at the Rosen Centre Hotel (formerly the Omni Rosen Hotel) in Orlando, Florida. ^{(12) Training and Testing for Future Strategic Issues/Future Warfare [CIRCA 2025] by Dennis M. Bushnell, NASA Langley Research Center http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2001testing/index.html (Archive.org)}