2015 TheSecondIntelligentSpeciesHowH
- (Brain, 2015) ⇒ Marshall Brain. (2015). “The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become As Irrelevant As Cockroaches.” BYG Publishing.
Subject Headings: Mass Human Unemployment.
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Abstract
Right now, as far as we can tell, there is exactly one intelligent species in the universe and it is us: human beings. We currently see no evidence of any kind indicating that extraterrestrials exist outside of our solar system. But at this moment, millions of engineers, scientists, corporations, universities and entrepreneurs are racing to create the second intelligent species right here on planet earth. And we can see the second intelligent species coming from all directions in the form of self-driving cars, automated call centers, chess-playing and Jeopardy-playing computers that beat all human players, airport kiosks, restaurant tablet systems, etc. The frightening thing is that these robots will soon be eliminating human jobs in startling numbers. The first wave of unemployed workers is likely to be a million truck drivers who are replaced by self-driving trucks. Pilots will be eliminated soon as well. Then, as new computer vision systems come online, we will see tens of millions of workers in retail stores, fast food restaurants and construction sites replaced by robots. Unless we take steps now to change the economy, we will soon have tens of millions of workers who are unemployed and seeking welfare because they will have no other choice. Marshall Brain's new book " The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches " explores how the future will unfold as the second intelligent species emerges. The book answers questions like: - How will new computer vision systems affect the job market? - How many people will become unemployed by the second intelligent species? - What will happen to millions of newly unemployed workers? - How can modern society and modern economies cope with run-away unemployment caused by robots? - What will happen when the first sentient, conscious computer appears? - What moral and ethical principles will guide the second intelligent species? - Why do we see no extraterrestrials in our universe? “ The Second Intelligent Species " offers a unique and fascinating look at the future of the human race, and the choices we will need to make to avoid massive unemployment and poverty worldwide as intelligent machines start eliminating millions of jobs.
Chapter 1 - The Origin and State of the First Intelligent Species
http://marshallbrain.com/second-intelligent-species1.htm
The following statement is something we all understand, but it bears repeating because it is perhaps the coolest, most interesting scientific fact that we know about our universe and human existence:
Hydrogen, given sufficient time, turns into people.
It is an amazing statement if you think about it. A collection of simple atoms swirling around in the early universe, combined with the ordinary laws of nature like gravity, created human beings living here on planet earth over the course of billions of years.
How does this happen? What path can phydrogen – the universe's simplest element – follow to turn itself into something as amazingly complicated and fascinating as a human being? The process has been explained by many people in many different ways and is supported by vast amounts of scientific evidence. Here is a summary version....
In the beginning, approximately 13.75 billion years ago, our universe sprang into existence. After a period of rapid inflation and cooling, it came to a starting point where it consisted primarily of normal, empty space and normal matter in the form of hydrogen atoms. That was it – empty space and an immense number of very simple atoms swirling around.
So there was hydrogen - lots and lots of hydrogen – filling the space of a new universe.
Objects that have mass attract one another, and hydrogen atoms have mass. So the universe's hydrogen atoms had a tendency to clump together.
If a large enough group of hydrogen atoms clump together, there is sufficient gravitational attraction amongst the atoms to create a fusion reactor - a star. It radiates massive quantities of heat and light into space. It also starts creating fusion products in its core. Hydrogen atoms fuse together to form helium atoms. Helium atoms fuse to form carbon and so on, forming all the elements up through iron.
Large stars then explode as supernovae. These explosions are gigantic and the blast pressure from the explosion creates all of the heavier natural elements up through Uranium. A cloud of dust and debris from the explosion, along with a great deal of as yet unused hydrogen, spreads out across space.
The dust from these supernova explosions collects into new solar systems, like ours. New stars form, with orbiting planets made from the fusion products of former stars. The process repeats.
Let's take a quick tangent here to look at the size of our universe. Stars live in groups that we call galaxies. How many galaxies are there? Current estimates run anywhere from 100 billion to 500 billion. How many is that? Let's assume that a single grain of salt represents one galaxy. Take a one pound (0.45 kg) package of salt and pour it out onto your kitchen table. There are approximately 10 million grains of salt in a pound. That little pile of salt on your table contains about 10 million galaxies. So to get 200 billion grains of salt, we need about 20,000 pounds of salt. That's a dump truck load of salt. There are a lot of galaxies in our universe.
But galaxies are not as big as a grain of salt. They are monstrous. The milky way galaxy - our galaxy - is 100,000 light years across. There are 200 to 400 billion stars in our one galaxy. Many of those stars have their own planets just like our sun does.
The point is that our universe is utterly enormous. Planet earth is a tiny speck that is part of a galaxy which, at the scale of the universe, is a tiny speck itself.
Nonetheless, this tiny speck of a planet is us. On this planet we have life. Millions of species form an intricate web of life on planet Earth today. Where did this life come from? Through the processes of abiogenesis and evolution, life arose, life evolved, and today here we are. People. Billions of people, and the number is rising inexorably.
Millions of interlocking pieces of scientific evidence from many scientific disciplines, revealed through several centuries of discovery, paint this amazing picture of our universe.
This is how Hydrogen turns into People. This is our creation story.
Randomness
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Chapter 10 - Why aren't there any Extraterrestrials? (Solution to Fermi Paradox)
http://marshallbrain.com/second-intelligent-species10.htm
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... Once general computer vision systems become a reality, these problems will accelerate dramatically. Tens of millions of people will become unemployed (see Chapter 5 for details).
If all of these newly unemployed people could transition to permanent vacation made possible by the robots, their lives would dramatically improve. But that can happen only if we see significant changes in the way the economy works (see Chapter 7).
We should use the historic opportunity that robots and automation are creating to radically change the way that the economy and politics work on planet Earth. We should end the appalling behaviors that have been a part of human history for many centuries and begin a new era of global human prosperity. In the ideal case we would solve all of the problems described in Chapter 1:
- We would unite as a species. Instead of dozens of nations that are often adversarial (e.g. the United States vs. China, NATO vs. Russia, The turmoil and hatred in the Middle East, etc.), we would come together as a single species with one nation and one common goal of solving the many important global problems we face.
- We would eliminate war.
- We would eliminate nuclear weapons pointed at each other and the existential threat they create.
- With war gone, we would rechannel the money spent on military activity to beneficial purposes.
- We would do the research to eliminate every parasite and disease and spread those cures freely to every human being.
- We would eliminate all poverty world wide.
- We would plan and implement a future where every human being will be on perpetual vacation living in luxury.
- To do that we would necessarily eliminate the concentration of wealth and spread the wealth from the robotic transition to everyone.
- We would gain control of human population, and then begin diminishing it through education and opportunity.
- We would begin a concerted effort to end and then reverse environmental destruction.
- We would stop pumping gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere, extract much of the carbon we have pumped, and sequester it to end ocean acidification and the mass extinction event it is about to bring.
- We would stop pumping plastic into the ocean and eliminate the ocean plastic problem.
- We would end the extinction of animals in the wild, and reverse the process.
- We would create many large human exclusion zones on the planet to let nature recover.
- And so on …
In other words, we would grow up as a species, get our act together, treat everyone equally and create what is in essence heaven on earth for every human being on the planet in an environmentally sustainable way. …
References
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| Author | volume | Date Value | title | type | journal | titleUrl | doi | note | year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 TheSecondIntelligentSpeciesHowH | Marshall Brain | The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become As Irrelevant As Cockroaches | 2015 |