The SuperHuman Age Manifesto
I find it helpful to remember that the graphical and widely available Internet was a teenager until just recently. (b.1993). As it enters its twentieth year of existence and sheds the fading wounds of adolescence it begins to enter a period when its true and full powers become known. If the last century was about recorded images, video and the birth of the Internet, this is the century of simulation and intelligence amplification — a century where humans will finally harness the power of networked intelligence to attain superhuman capabilities.
“The things we make, make us.”-Marshall McLuhan
I think of the Information Age as a chess game. In chess you have three stages: the opening game, the middle game and the end game. In the opening game there are very few surprises. The middle game is where the game will be decided. In the middle game there are as many potential games as there are stars in the galaxy.
We have just completed the first stage of the information age. In that stage we created powerful technologies, then we painfully adapted to them on their terms so that we could make use of them. We learned to program in arcane languages to communicate with computers. We tethered ourselves to desktops, flickering screens and keyboards, suffering eye strain and carpal tunnel syndrome. In the first stage of the information age the things we made, made us.
The beneficiaries of social media are not its users
Our technology asks too much of us, makes us work too hard. In the last two decades we watched schools, hospitals, architecture offices, and companies large and small, implement technology and completely change their habits, alter their focus, re-design living and working spaces to meet technology on its terms. We attended training courses for days and weeks. All too often humans would forget the real aim of their effort: educating children, healing people, manufacturing and moving goods and delivering services that make people’s lives better and more productive. They would end up in a Faustian bargain serving the technology instead of doing the noble things they originally sought to do.
And we began to create what we now call Data exhaust, Big Data, Profiles and breadcrumbs that track our every behavior. We gave this information freely to social media. It took us a while to realize the Big Secret of Social Media. The biggest beneficiaries of social media were not us, not the users, but those who were poised to exploit our data. New billionaires were born wearing hoodies and snarkily commenting on the streams of highly personal data we fed them. Wireless pacemaker feeds can not be accessed by the person with the implant, but only by the company who implanted it.
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention
The human/machine interface is becoming ambient and should disappear
We are awash in data. Information, news, advertisements, apps, videos, images; they all compete for our attention. It is becoming increasingly difficult to sort and sift, to filter an increasingly crowded and confusing Internetworked data space. What should we pay attention to, and what can we safely ignore?
A new class of technologies are emerging from the ashes of the Artificial Intelligence Age called neural nets. Neural nets are the optimal method for solving the filtering problem of information deluge. Machines are great at many things. Humans, for the foreseeable future, are still better at others. Combining these two powerful computation systems, man and machine, gets you the best results. And it does it with very little effort from humans. Having these powerful systems serve us personally, instead of serving corporations, will usher in a new age and change our relationship with technology.
It is time to proclaim an end to the era of humans as servants of technology. It is time that technology serves us. It is time to end the decade of social media exploitation of our information in order to serve up mostly untrue information to try and persuade us to buy things we don’t need. The things we make, shouldn’t rule us, but serve us. Our personal data should empower us personally, not empower Madison Avenue. Technology should not be a barrier between us and the problems we are trying to solve. It should be an ally. Even a servant. What we want is to be better, know more, educate children, heal people, discover better ways to manage resources and society. We want better ideas. We want time. We want freedom. We want knowledge
“The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed”- William Gibson
I envision a future where we accomplish all of these things with fluid, super human powers, because we are enabled by technology, not because we have climbed steep learning curves and learned to meet it on its terms. We will be super-empowered and only dimly aware of the straining technology that is serving us, working hard to help us make a better future possible.
It is time for to turn the tables on social media and advertisers. Time for what Doc Searle calls “The Intention Economy”. Humans, partnered with powerful neural nets that serve us using ambient mobile interfaces that do our bidding and anticipate our needs, will create the next stage of the information age. They will end disease, manufacture human organs, make some seriously smart robots and generally change the course of human history.
10 Principles of the SuperHuman Age Manifesto
1. In an accelerating, increasingly complex information age, frictionless access to online information is a human right.
2. The most powerful force in the Universe is intelligence.
3. Intelligence is information + computation. You can’t have intelligence if you don’t have ready access to good, relevant information.
4. The most valuable resource in this century is human attention. — Herbert Simon
5. You shouldn’t have to work so hard to use technology to get information you need or want; information that aligns with your interests. AI is the new UI! (said first by David Morgan, I believe)
6. Your information should not be mediated by forces that are not aligned with your specific interests. (Social media, advertisers, government)
7. Your social media friends are not the best predictors of what you will find interesting. Alignment is not as high as you might think.
8. The main beneficiaries of social media are not its users.
9. Human suffering on planet Earth is simply the result of bad ideas.
10. The interface must become ambient. All useful information technology must be accessed in a pleasing delightful way on mobile, even wearable devices (like the 2.0 version of Google Glass or the Microsoft Hololens).
Richard Boyd is a computer gaming technology entrepreneur and recovering aerospace company executive who is now the founder of a neural net company called Szl.it. www.szl.it AI is the new UI
