Just in time for summer movie season comes news that something huge is lurking out there at the edge of the solar system. It’s really big. It’s never before been detected. It’s warping gravity fields.
No, it’s not the latest Michael Bay disaster-fest or the mothership from “Independence Day.” It’s not the hypothesized Planet 9 that everyone was talking about a little over a year ago. Probably it’s another planet. Or maybe that mothership.
Great story in Politico Magazine on #transhumanism and a future AI President. My direct digital democracy ideas and others are mentioned: “Istvan, for one, envisions regular national elections, in which voters would decide on the robot’s priorities and how it should come out on moral issues like abortion; the voters would then have a chance in the next election to change those choices. The initial programming of the system would no doubt be controversial, and the programmers would probably need to be elected, too. All of this would require amending the Constitution, Istvan acknowledges.”
Yes, it sounds nuts. But some techno-optimists really believe a computer could make better decisions for the country—without the drama and shortsightedness we accept from our human leaders.
The toilet-paper principle suggests that we should be paying as much attention to the cheapest technologies as to the most sophisticated. One candidate: cheap sensors and cheap internet connections. There are multiple sensors in every smartphone, but increasingly they’re everywhere, from jet engines to the soil of Californian almond farms — spotting patterns, fixing problems and eking out efficiency gains.
Forget flying cars or humanoid robots. The most disruptive inventions are often cheap, simple and easy to overlook.
The vital question for governments around the world, whatever their country’s economic situation, needs to be: what is the future of work in an era of exponential technological development?
Posted in robotics/AI
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a trip to Homer, Alaska, this weekend to do characteristically Alaskan things, like catching fish, cutting fish, watching other people catch fish, oh, and thinking hard about the concept of basic income.
Zuckerberg visited Homer as part of his personal challenge to visit every state in America in 2017. While there, he took some time out of fishing to write a blog post about Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend, a state-sponsored form of basic income that redistributes profits from the state’s natural resources to its residents once a year, usually handing them around $1,000 per person (some years as much as $2,000).
“This is a novel approach to basic income in a few ways. First, it’s funded by natural resources rather than raising taxes,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Second, it comes from conservative principles of smaller government, rather than progressive principles of a larger safety net. This shows basic income is a bipartisan idea.
