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Comment by cousin_it | Hacker News Reader

I feel there's a much higher chance that humanity will drastically change its own fate (for better or worse) in the next hundred years, and any forecasts beyond that have very wide error bars. Artificial intelligence is the big one (it ends the current era of "business as usual" no matter whether it's friendly or not), but there's also nanotech, superviruses coming from desktop bio-hackery, mind uploading, good old nuclear terrorism, etc. For "business as usual" to continue and things like climate change to stay relevant, we need to dodge all of the above, which is difficult.

For a more thoughtful take on the future of humanity, Google for the keywords "existential risk". Bostrom's writeup is a good start: http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html

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Technology, even AI, is only a tool - whether it is used for good or evil depends on the hand that wields it. There is no reason to believe that any new technology will help humankind as a whole as long as those that desire power are lavishly rewarded for their malevolent acts. Our society today is defined by war, authority that refuses accountability, and oppression of anyone with less power than ourselves.

We have plenty of technology to solve all of our problems already - more will not save us.

Strong AI is more than a tool - it's life, created by humans and more intelligent than we are. How could that not change everything?

That is if Strong AI is not just a myth. I think that intelligence is simply a process that determines behavior to accomplish a goal. The question becomes, what goals will people program these genius machines to accomplish?

Vernor Vinge, the man who coined the phrase "Technological Singularity", gave an interesting talk describing three scenarios if the Singularity does not happen. He calls them A Return to MADness, The Golden Age, and The Wheel of Time. He still regards the Singularity as the most likely non-catastrophic outcome for our near future.

"What If the Singularity Does NOT Happen" text: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/longnow/

Earlier generations could have said the same thing before each of: the internet, petroleum, flight, biotech, robotics, atomic bombs, the electric grid, the automobile, etc.

AI, nanotech, biohacking, and other possible future technologies just don't seem anywhere near as disruptive as that first list. They'll get incorporated into the "business as usual" machine if they come to pass at all — and much more easily than, say, atomic bombs were.

A world with cars and electricity looks like "business as usual" to us, but not to the people who lived before cars and electricity. The rate of change is now much faster than they were accustomed to. The technologies I listed will make it faster still. You can't talk meaningfully about what happens a thousand years from now, because accelerating change implies that at a certain point in imagining the future you just run out of imagination, and that point might be a hundred years away or even closer.

Just the first item on your list is enough to change everything. If we can make computers as smart as humans, we can automate so many jobs, and then vastly scale them simply by building more computers. If you make those computers faster, you speed up the entire world's economy that much more (which speeds up the computers that are designing better computers.)

If you make those AIs smarter than human, who even knows what is possible.

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