Evolution or Utopia?

Another complex topic, another difficult post to write so… again, bear with me if I ramble too much.

We have been told that we are living in the best and most advanced society of what we know so far; and I am partly agree with it. There is no doubt that there have not been a society more advanced in history if we consider our technology, medicine and life expectancy. As for what we know so far, we are lucky to live in a time where we are seeing pinnacle advances almost every day.

And yet we do not believe it. At least not widely as it supposed to be if it is really the case. In fact, there is a hopeless feeling when people talk about how are we evolving in our society and what human race is becoming. There are resounding reasons to feel like this:

• We are immerse in a social crisis where fundamental values like empathy, common sense and kindness are being supplanted by materialism, envy and corruption.
• Social isolation has drastically increased in mass societies and hyper communicated; which is a paradox.
• Generally speaking, in most modern countries have been a turn over within their communities where criminals are being victimised, and victims being criminalised.
• Populism is a global trend now and people are making important decisions and choosing their leaders following an immediate response without thinking enough the consequences even for the mid term.
• The geopolitical framework is the most instable of the last 60 years. This is triggering global threats for each new conflict that fires up.

These are some of the reasons (I don’t want to make the post that long) and examples for each there are a lot. Even while I am writing this post I can feel this hopeless feeling but we must always think in a wider perspective of the things. I am more inline with the opinion of some sociologist which is that our global society is starting a period of change; and this is good news because when we speak of change on global society means evolve to a better place.

Don’t take it wrong though. This does not mean it is going to be an easy and effortless. I believe the change we are going to suffer will be one of the biggest, a big leap. But this will cost huge amount of suffering, periods of apparent darkness and several turning points leading us to a better society.

One important role to play in this theatre of change will the technology. We are already immerse on a tech-time but we barely scratched its potential for us to achieve things we still cannot envise yet. The AI is one part of the forthcoming technology advance that will have an important impact in this change; specially the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) which will allow us to recreate human level intelligence completely to help us and it will be the starting point to achieve the long-time dreamed free-job society where human will just live and robots will work to sustain financial, tax and social care needs. It sounds utopian, at least for now, but the pathway for this is closer that we think.

There is a lot to talk about these lines. Right now I am reading a book that talk about this analysing the AI today and the paths it is taking for the future; all from a technology perspective. Once I finish it I would like to make a new post talking about all is discussed there but if you like this topic, I strongly recommend to read Life 3.0: Being human in the age of Artificial Intelligence from Max Tegmark, a Swedish-American physicist and cosmologist from the MIT and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organization backed by big names such Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking, and whose work has helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial.