Happy Publication Day to Jay Ingram’s latest book, The Future of Us; The Science of What We’ll Eat, Where We’ll Live, and Who We’ll Be. I am excited to collaborate with Simon & Schuster Canada to bring you an exclusive excerpt from the book.
About The Future of Us
A fascinating look at the cutting-edge science and technologies that are on the cusp of changing everything from where we’ll live, how we’ll look, and who we’ll be, by the popular science broadcaster and bestselling author Jay Ingram.
Where will we live? How will we get around? What will we look like? These are just some of the questions bestselling author and popular science broadcaster Jay Ingram answers in this exciting examination of the science and technologies that will affect every aspect of human life.
In these pages, Ingram explores the future of our technological civilization. He reports on cutting-edge research in organ and limb regeneration, advances in prosthetics, the merging of the human and the synthetic, and gene editing. Vertical farming and lab-grown food might help feed millions and alleviate pressure on the planet. Cities could accommodate green space and the long-awaited flying car. Finally, he speculates on the future of artificial general intelligence, even artificial superintelligence, as well as our place on Earth and in the universe.
The potential impact of these developments in science and technology will be powerful and wide-ranging, complicated by ethics and social equity. And they will inevitably revolutionize every aspect of life and even who we are. This is The Future of Us.
About Jay Ingram
Jay Ingram has hosted two national science programs in Canada, Quirks & Quarks on CBC radio and Daily Planet on Discovery Channel Canada. He is the author of nineteen books, which have been translated into fifteen languages, including the bestselling five-volume The Science of Why series. In 2015, he won the Walter C. Alvarez Award from the American Medical Writers’ Association for excellence in communicating health care developments and concepts to the public, and from 2005 to 2015 he chaired the Science Communications Program at the Banff Centre. Jay has six honorary degrees, was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, and is a Member of the Order of Canada. He is cofounder of the arts and engineering street festival called Beakerhead in Calgary. He lives in Calgary, Alberta. Connect with him on Twitter @JayIngram.
Excerpt fromThe Future of Us by Jay Ingram
Could It Be a Nightmare?
Imagine a superintelligent. AI of the future that is given the goal of maximizing a factory’s production of paper clips. Of course, a superintelligence would inevitably figure out ways to improve production, ways that never would have occurred to mere humans, no matter how smart they are. This could turn out to be a welcome moneymaker for the factory as its production maximizes profits by meeting the worldwide appetite for paper clips. But when the AI is given the goal of accelerating paper clip production, it depends crucially on how exactly that goal is expressed. If the goal is open- ended— make as many paper clips as possible— the outcome might be ruinous: the factory might shut down all other production just to make paper clips. But even a more constrained goal could go wrong. As Bostrom suggests, try making the goal to manufacture exactly one million paper clips. The superintelligence might reason that there’s always uncertainty when counting such large numbers, and therefore uncertainty as to whether it’s reached the goal of one million. So make more! There’s really no downside to having made too many, and doing so eliminates the tiny probability that it might have failed to reach its goal. One way or another, this level of production would demand more factory space, in fact several more factories, and may even necessitate converting a number of existing buildings into paper clip factories. And if you let your mind run wild, the AI will set out to convert the entire Earth to making paper clips. (As Bostrom says, it’s all just rearranging atoms when it comes down to it.) That’s before it dispatches rockets to the Moon to make paper clips there. And because it’s superintelligent, the AI has already anticipated that at some undetermined point humans might want to turn it off, so it’s taken the necessary steps to prevent that possibility.
Laugh if you will, but I feel like I should repeat that this is a superintelligence we’re talking about, so if you find these hypotheses unbelievable, at least part of that is due to the fact that you’re just not intelligent enough (I say that respectfully, of course).
This tragedy could be cut off at the pass by specifying that the AI manufacture exactly one million paper clips and no more. But could it? Bostrom argues that the AI, plagued by statistical fears of uncertainty, might adopt other procedures, like counting them over and over and over, or examining each one to ensure that it meets paper clip standards, or building yet more industrial and computing supports to reassure itself that it has achieved the final goal. What if it suspects that humans are using them up too fast? Bostrom’s point is that before we set goals for AI, we would have to be absolutely certain that there is no possibility of misinterpretation, no AI version of willfulness, no chance of a paper clip world.
I hope you enjoyed this excerpt! The chosen excerpt comes from the Artificial Intelligence related chapters of the book. I have reading a lot of fiction about AI and am excited to dive into these chapters.
The first couple parts of the book talk about evolution, the future of population, food, housing and more. I am enjoying this refreshing look at advanced technologies, where we are, and all that may come. I’m reminded of many scifi novels along the way and I am looking forward to enumerating them all in my review.
Stay tuned for my review next week as part of October’s Non-Fiction Feature of the Month. Meantime, add The Future of Us to your Goodreads shelf and if you want to dive in right away, get a copy from your local library or bookstore.
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