Thursday, May 21, 2015

A Post-Human World ???

Here is another "the robots are coming, and they will be better than us !!!" essay:

In Davos a few years ago, I met a well-known Indian tycoon. Knowing I had the title Astronomer Royal, he asked: “Do you do the Queen’s horoscopes?” I responded, with a straight face: “If she wanted one, I’m the person she’d ask.” He then seemed eager to hear my predictions. I told him that markets would fluctuate and that there would be trouble in the Middle East. He paid rapt attention to these insights. But I then came clean. I said I was just an astronomer, not an astrologer. He immediately lost all interest in my predictions. And rightly so: scientists are rotten forecasters – worse, often, than writers of science fiction.

Nevertheless, 12 years ago, I wrote a book that I entitled Our Final Century? My publisher deleted the question-mark. The American publishers changed the title to Our Final Hour – Americans seek instant (dis)gratification. My theme was this: our Earth is 45 million centuries old, but this century is special. It’s the first when one species – ours – can determine the biosphere’s fate.

In the years since, a few forecasts have somewhat firmed up: the world is becoming more crowded – and warmer. There will be about 2 billion more people in 2050, and their collective “footprint” will threaten our finite planet’s ecology unless we can achieve more efficient use of energy and land. But we can’t predict the path of future technology that far ahead. Today’s smartphones would have seemed magic even 20 years ago, so in looking several decades ahead we must keep our minds open to breakthroughs that may now seem like science fiction. These will offer great hopes, but also great fears.

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Abstract thinking by biological brains has underpinned the emergence of all culture and science. But this activity - spanning tens of millennia at most - will be a brief precursor to the more powerful intellects of the inorganic post-human era. So, in the far future, it won’t be the minds of humans, but those of machines, that will most fully understand the cosmos – and it will be the actions of autonomous machines that will most drastically change our world, and perhaps what lies beyond.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/11605785/Astronomer-Royal-Martin-Rees-predicts-the-world-will-be-run-by-computers-soon.html

Anyone who gets invited to Davos belongs to the cult of oligarchs, bankgangsters, corporations, and their collaborators in the one percent. They may in fact someday come up with a plan to "save the world", but it will be their world which gets saved and not ours. They are programming the robots to be like them, not like We The People.

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