Lifeboat Foundation

Is humanity doomed? Are we one of the last generations of homo sapiens — soon to be supplanted by engineered cyberbeings, with a distant semblance to their creators (us)?

On Jan. 24, historian and international best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari presented his view of the future at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Harari wrote Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and also Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.

In a riveting 25-minute presentation, Harari painted a very gloomy — but possible — view of the future, based on his thesis that we are now in our third grand revolution: the control of data, following the control of land (Agrarian Revolution) and the control of machinery (Industrial Revolution). The point of no return, Harari contends, will happen when technology will be able to extract high-precision biometric data from people and report back to a centralized decision-making control system, owned by governments or by corporations — or both. By biometric, he means your pulse, pressure, sweat composition, dilation of your pupils, etc.: kind of a lie-detector on steroids.

Continue reading “Biometric Data And The Rise Of Digital Dictatorship” »

Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 tries to rectify the situation. Written in an accessible and engaging style, and aimed at the general public, the book offers a political and philosophical map of the promises and perils of the AI revolution. Instead of pushing any one agenda or prediction, Tegmark seeks to cover as much ground as possible, reviewing a wide variety of scenarios concerning the impact of AI on the job market, warfare and political systems.

Yuval Noah Harari responds to an account of the artificial intelligence era and argues we are profoundly ill-prepared to deal with future technology.

Unprecedented acute concentration of wealth happens alongside these expulsions. Advanced economic and technical achievements enable this wealth and the expulsion of surplus groups. At the same time, Sassen writes, they create a kind of nebulous centerlessness as the locus of power:

The oppressed have often risen against their masters. But today the oppressed have mostly been expelled and survive a great distance from their oppressors … The “oppressor” is increasingly a complex system that combines persons, networks, and machines with no obvious centre.

Surplus populations removed from the productive aspects of the social world may rapidly increase in the near future as improvements in AI and robotics potentially result in significant automation unemployment. Large swaths of society may become productively and economically redundant. For historian Yuval Noah Harari “the most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: what should we do with all the superfluous people?”

Continue reading “Could the quest for super-intelligence and eternal life lead us into a dystopian nightmare?” »

The next billion dollar industry will not be a service or product – it will be upgrading humans, an expert has revealed.

It has been suggested that humans will have access to technology that will allow them to ‘upgrade themselves into gods’.

Bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari has also warned that because not everyone will be able to experience the upgrade, due to costs, there will be a divide that could spark ‘old racist ideologies’ — but this time, differences will be ‘engineered and manufactured’.

Continue reading “Upgrading humans into GODS will be the next ‘billion dollar industry’” »

Historian Yuval Noah Harari makes a bracing prediction: just as mass industrialization created the working class, the AI revolution will create a new unworking class.

The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?

This is not an entirely new question. People have long feared that mechanization might cause mass unemployment. This never happened, because as old professions became obsolete, new professions evolved, and there was always something humans could do better than machines. Yet this is not a law of nature, and nothing guarantees it will continue to be like that in the future. The idea that humans will always have a unique ability beyond the reach of non-conscious algorithms is just wishful thinking. The current scientific answer to this pipe dream can be summarized in three simple principles: