Dialogue between Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

This is a fascinating, thought-provoking dialogue about the future of humanity, but it's heavy on speculation, and light on evidence. 

For example, here is Yuval Noah Harari speculating about a future in which advances in technology have rendered most humans worthless as workers:

Yes, the social side is the more important and more difficult one. I don't have a solution, and the biggest question maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people. I don't think we have an economic model for that. My best guess, which is just a guess, is that food will not be a problem. With that kind of technology, you will be able to produce food to feed everybody. The problem is more boredom, and what to do with people, and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically meaningless, worthless.

Harari makes a lot of assumptions. The fundamental assumption is that many or most people will not find ways to make their labor a useful complement to the labor of machines and computers.

This assumption is present in most discussions about Our Robotic Future, or Our Future after the Singularity. And for all I know it may be true. But surely it isn't the only possible scenario. By analogy, the Industrial Revolution didn't render manual laborers obsolete--it just required them to gain the skills necessary for working with machines in factories.

Now, there's certainly no guarantee that many or most workers will be able to gain the skills necessary to make their labor valuable in Our Robotic Future. And Tyler Cowen and other economists have presented evidence that income inequality is currently on the rise precisely because only some workers have managed to gain the skills and training necessary to make their labor a useful complement to the labor of computers. But I don't see a discussion of this or other evidence by Harari and Kahneman, which makes most of their comments pretty speculative.

Visions of Futures Past

Matt Novak, writing for Gizmodo, has presented images from what he describes as the "golden age of American futurism", the years 1958 to 1963. The images all come from a Sunday comic strip called "Closer Than We Think." While many of the predictions made by the strip are (perhaps inevitably) way off the mark, the strip also had a surprising number of hits or at least impressively near misses. Even the howlers are noteworthy for their retro-futuristic design. Here are some samples.

1. Video interviews in a "one-world job market":

2. Wrist watch TV (not so far from smart phones):

3. Electric cars:

4. Driverless cars:

5. Push-button education:

6. Robotic warehouses (cf. Amazon's warehouse system):

Our Dystopian Future?

A recent review by Rick Searle shows the continuing relevance of economist Tyler Cowen's Average Is Over when it comes to understanding Our (possible) Dystopian Future.

From Searle's review:

In Cowen’s world the rich with money to burn are chased down with a combination of AI, behavioral economics, targeted consumer surveillance, and old fashioned, fleshy persuasion to part with their cash, but what will such a system be like for those chronically out of work? Even should mass government surveillance disappear tomorrow, (fat chance) it seems the poor will still face a world where the forces behind their ever more complex society become increasingly opaque, responsible humans harder to find, and in which they are constantly “nudged” by people who claim to know better. For the poor, surveillance technologies will likely be used not to sell them stuff which they can’t afford, but are a tool of the repo-man, and debt collector, parole officer, and cop that will slowly chisel away whatever slim column continues to connect them the former middle class world of their parents. It is a world more akin to the 1940’s or even the 1840’s than it is to anything we have taken to be normal since the middle of the 20th century.

Should We Fear the Filter?

Scott Alexander shares his thoughts about Robin Hanson's "Great Filter", which refers to a factor which weeds out civilizations in the universe, thus explaining why we don't observe more (really, any) advanced spacefaring civilizations in the known universe. Alexander argues that none of the so-called "late filters" proposed are very likely, and so we should not fear a late filter (and perhaps should feel some relief that we have passed beyond a hypothetical early filter?).

This blog post is remarkable, not least because of the fact that the comments are just as good if not better than the post itself (how often has this happened in the whole history of the internet?).