M2M Day 158: My detailed breakdown of the Future of Everything
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For April, my goal is to hold a 30-minute conversation in Hebrew on the future of technology.
My goal this month is to hold a 30-minute conversation on the future of technology. In order to do so, I need 30 minutes of conversional material.
For the past week, whenever I have an idea for a conversational topic, I would add it to my ongoing “Max’s ideas on the future” Google Doc.
After a week, the Google Doc became hopelessly disorganized, and it was unclear when I would have enough aggregated material. There was no clear finish line in sight, and, as I explained yesterday, this was very overwhelming.
So, today, I spent 45 minutes combing through the Google Doc and organizing my ideas into discreet categories.
Ultimately, I decided to take categorical inspiration from Tim Ferriss’s Tools of Titans, and divided my notes into three categories: Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise (see below).
Within each category, I’ve included high-level topic-defining questions (there are 11 question in total across the three categories), and under each question, I’ve bulleted out my main talking points.
As a result, I now have eleven discreet topics, within three categories, that will act as the complete fuel for my 30-minute conversation. I should be able cover all topics by devoting one topic to each Skype session over the next 2–2.5 weeks.
With my ideas on the future completely structured, I can now focus 95% of my energies on actually learning the Hebrew.
HEALTHY — How will technology impact the future of health, medicine, and lifespan?
1. What will the field of health/medicine look like in the future?
- Artificial wombs
- Robot surgeries and doctors
- Genetically-personalized treatments
- Continuous health monitoring and prediction
- Will meals still be a thing? Will food still be a thing?
2. When will humans live forever and how does this change the dynamics of life?
- Anyone under the age of 50 will probably live forever
- The pace of life-lengthening advancements > the pace of life
- The “work for retirement” model doesn’t work
- Does monogamy work in this model?
- Uploading your brain
- Is living forever actually a good thing?
3. What effect will genetic engineering have on the future?
- CRISPR
- Designer babies and the inevitable pressures to “upgrade”
- Genetic inequality and different “genetic classes” of humans
- Personalized medicine and “genetic corrections”
4. Will humans become “cyborgs” and, if they do, what are the implications?
- Humans are already cyborgs → We are already connected to the internet via our devices; are already “upgraded” via pace makers, cochlear implants, artificial limbs, etc.
- Cyborg-ification will happen gradually and invisibly, until humans are more machine than matter.
- Elon Musk’s new company Neuralink
- Is this just the natural course of evolution, where the mutations are just better controlled?
5. How will the human life be valued in the future?
- The Trolley Problem
- The Singularity → Humans as “pets”
- What is “life” if there is no death?
- If effective cloning and reanimation exist, what does that mean?
6. How will the proliferation strategy of the human race change in the future?
- Multi-planetary survival strategy; Terraforming, Living on Mars
- Sending “frozen embryos” to distant planets?
- Will the commoditization of life essentials lead to overpopulation? Will overpopulation matter in a non-city-centric future? (How many VR-wearing, non-mobile humans could the land mass of Earth accommodate?)
WEALTHY — How will technology impact the future of economics, careers, and prosperity?
7. Will careers exist in the future and what are the implications for humans?
- Artificial intelligence
- Automation (cars, drones, etc.)
- Jobs will probably start dying before money does, but at some point, should we even care about jobs?
- Are any jobs “safe” in the long-run? Nope.
- How will the distribution of wealth be determined? Does it matter?
8. What is the future of money and will currency be valuable in the future?
- Does Bitcoin have a future?
- If the production of everything important becomes automated and then effectively commoditized, is money even a necessary thing?
- In the future, what will be the main store of value?
9. What kind of impact will technology have on inequality?
- Genetic inequality → Genocide a la Neanderthals?
- If everyone can “have” everything they want, will inequality be irrelevant?
- Who will be the “ruling party” of the future world?
- The internet/globalization let developing countries catch up by providing cheap labor. Once cheap labor is eliminated, the gap is only going to grow because of biological and technological differences. Ultimately creating different classes of humans.
WISE — How will technology impact the future of happiness, purpose, and love?
10. How does future technology influence the “pursuit of happiness”?
- Physiologically lowering the brain’s happiness threshold
- Without careers or monetary needs, how will people find meaning?
- At what point does it become socially acceptable to marry a robot? Is this a good thing?
- Believable VR will effectively enable access to all experiences to all people… How will this change what it means to be happy? Does it even matter at this point?
- How does the Simulation Hypothesis help us better understand meaning in an artificial world?
- Once we’ve fully mastered “survival”, what’s the point of life?
11. What are humans’ place in the world if they lose their spot as the most intelligent species?
- The Singularity
- The Turing Test
- Is it better to live like a pet anyway?
- The decoupling of intelligence and consciousness (analogy: a network of trees)
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
