Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
As AI and robotics continue to scale at unimaginable speeds, with AI getting exponentially smarter and robots increasingly more agile, we’ve got to realize how many jobs will disappear in a very short time period. This isn’t a gradual transition, it’s not a move from one field to another like farmers transitioning into factory workers during the industrial revolution. It’s a massive shift from human labour to machine labour that the world’s economies simply aren’t designed to absorb.
I’ve seen a growth in the number of people talking about the need for Universal Basic Income (UBI), but I fear this isn’t enough. I fear that the idea of giving millions if not billions of people a basic income, but no real means for most of them to supplement those incomes as an insufficient solution. We don’t need UBI, we need UCI – Universal Comfortable Income. It’s not going to be enough to give people a basic survival income. We are going to need to see governments, and maybe even companies, share their resources and wealth with people, or else who is going to have the resources to buy the products and services AI and robots will offer?
The potential for dissatisfaction and ultimately unrest seems scary to me. A world with a couple dozen trillion-dollar companies, and a handful of trillionaires running them, is also a world with vast populations of people eking out a subsistence lifestyle, unable to do more than meet their survival needs. A basic income, requiring additional sources of income to appreciate the offerings of a fully automated economy, will not survive without a revolt for too long.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are other solutions to this problem. Maybe I’m too bullish about to how far things will advance in a short time. That said, the potential for the scenario above to occur in the next decade is not zero. It might be a pessimistic bad-case or even worse-case scenario, but it’s possible… and scary. If things advance as fast as I think they will, we can’t continue to have UBI conversations, we need to move the goal posts and start really thinking of UCI.
I subscribe to superhuman.ai, a daily email newsletter. Most days I peruse it for about 3-5 minutes before work, primarily focussing on the ‘Today in AI’ section. It’s fascinating to see how the field of AI is rapidly advancing. On weekends the email shifts topics. Saturday is a robotics special and Sundays are focused on scientific and technological breakthroughs outside of AI.
Here are some videos shared in yesterday’s Superhuman robotics focused update:
Then here are 3 sections from today’s email. Two related to technological advances:
Star Power: France just took a massive lead in the race to near-limitless clean energy. The country’s CEA WEST Tokamak reactor has shattered China’s record, maintaining a hydrogen plasma reaction for 22 minutes and 17 seconds flat. While it’s not commercial-ready yet, it’s a major leap in fusion research and has huge implications for the development of ITER, the world’s largest fusion project, in the south of France.
Two-way Street: Chinese researchers have built the world’s first two-way brain-computer interface (BCI). Unlike conventional BCIs that just decode brain signals, this system creates a feedback loop where both the brain and the machine learn from each other and improve at working together over time.
And 3 related to health and longevity:
Cancer Counter: Scientists at Memorial Sloan Kettering have reported promising results from a small trial that used personalized mRNA vaccines to fight pancreatic cancer. Out of the 16 participants who were administered the vaccine, at least half generated long-lasting cancer-fighting T cells, with early results suggesting fewer recurrences. Researchers estimate these T cells could persist for years, offering hope for a future breakthrough.
Fountain of Youth: Japanese bioengineers claim to have found the ‘rewind’ button for aging. Noticing that older cells were considerably larger in size than younger ones, the scientists discovered that they were packed in a layer of the AP2A1 protein. This led them to conclude that blocking the protein could reverse aging — a potential breakthrough for anti-aging treatments. We’ll believe it when we see it.
Follicle Fix: Research teams around the worldare possibly getting closer to reversing hair loss with a host of innovative new treatments. They’re currently testing a sugar-based gel that could stimulate blood supply to hair follicles, potentially offering a simple, affordable cure for baldness. Also, a new topical gel, PP405, aims to “wake up” dormant hair follicle stem cells, while exosome-based therapies show promise in regrowing hair naturally.
Two years ago, I would have said we were 15-20 years away from intelligent robots living among us, now I think wealthy people will have these in the houses before the end of the year, and they will become even more affordable and mainstream before the end of 2026.
Two years ago I actually believed and shared that my kids would be the first generation to routinely live past 100 years old, barring accidents and rare diagnoses that haven’t yet been cured. Now I can actually conceive of this being true for my generation.
I thought Universal Basic Income was going to be a thing in the 2040’s or 2050’s… Now I look at how intelligent LLM’s are, and how advance robots are, and I wonder how we’ll make it through the 2020’s without needing to financially support both white collar and blue collar workers who are pushed out of jobs by AI and robots.
The speed of innovation is accelerating and right now we are just scratching the surface of AI inspired innovation. What happens when an AI with the equivalent knowledge of 100,000 plus of our most intelligent humans starts to make intuitive connections between entire bodies of knowledge from science, technology, politics, economics, culture, nature, and even art?
In 1985 the movie Back to the Future took us forward to 2015 where there were hovering skate boards. In 40 years rather than 30 we haven’t gotten there yet. But look at the progress in robotics from 2015-2025. This is going to advance exponentially from 2025 to 2030.
If the Back to the Future movie were made today, and the future Marty McFly went to was 2055, I bet the advancements of our imagination would be underwhelming compared to what would actually be possible. While I don’t think we will be there yet with space travel and things like a Mars space station, I think the innovations here on earth will far exceed what we can think of right now.
