:Technology is neither good nor bad

nor is it neutral.(It certainly can’t be un-invented.)

THE FUTURE (AND|OF) TECHNOLOGYby @patricksavalle, the 2017 version

Inventor of MOBBR, one of the more disruptive systems / startups

Author, photographer, systems architect, coder

Full-stack innovator

Why has human progress ground to a halt?

http://aeon.co/magazine/science/why-has-human-progress-ground-to-a-halt/

Entering a dark age of innovation

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7616-entering-a-

dark-age-of-innovation.html

The great stagnation

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/01/growth_2

THE DARK AGES OF INNOVATIONWe were promised flying cars, all we got was 140 chars. And batteries everywhere.

3D PRINTING

Create objects by printing them, just input a design and raw materials.

Status: typical technological innovation that will get better, faster, cheaper exponentially.

Common in aerospace, orthopedic and dental applications. Fast adoption in oil, gas and

military

Holy grail: Star Trek replicator, Nano-scale 3D printing, instantiation of living things,

synthetic morphogenesis

Related technologies: additive manufacturing, distributed manufacturing, nature’s

morphogenesis.

Status: unstoppable avalanche. Think years, not decades.

.

AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

Remove the driver from the vehicle (car, airplane, ship).

Status: closely follows the progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence though it does not need to be a ML/AI solution itself.

As with all autonomous and AI-based technology: ethical and legal issues to be solved, certainly when applied for military purposes.

Requires large investments in infrastructure.

Status: very large industry effort to get this thing going. General-purpose full autonomy not anytime soon but already very useable partial autonomy.

THE INTERNET OF THINGS

Everything connected to the internet, like a bionic layer over planet earth.

From large industrial machines to MEMS (micro electromechanical sensors).

Typical, predictable technological innovation: will get faster, cheaper FAST!

Huge privacy and security issues, a hackers paradise.

Status: unstoppable avalanche. Think years, not decades

Programs that are ‘intelligent’ (confusion right there: intelligent does not mean autonomous or sentient).

Experts agree ‘human AI’ not anytime soon, maybe never. No, Musk, Gates and Hawkin are not experts.

‘By 2029 no computer or machine intelligence will have passed the Turing test’http://longbets.org/1/

Status: already widespread use for specialized tasks, first general purpose AI (the Alpha GO) self-teaches and outplays humans on Go and Atari-games.

Holy grail: emotions, self-awareness

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Organisms created to genetic specification.

Status: overhyped, little progress since the disappointing Human Genome Project. Big ethical issues. We can modify plants to grow human collagen, not much more

Genetic determinism still just an dream. Genomics stumbling from one failing hypothesis to another.

Being able to decode or edit a genome does not mean understanding it. At all. It takes more than CRISPR.

Greedy investment climate because of big, patentable promises.

DESIGNER SPECIES

GENE DRIVES

Overruling Mendelian inheritance on species level. Release molecules in the wild (the gene drives) that interfere with natural reproduction enabling ‘evolution’ of fast reproducing species by specification.

‘Take the malaria out of mosquito’.

‘Towards a Post-Darwinian biosphere’- Pleistocene rewilding- Status quo, preserve current biosphere- Compassionated biology- Destroy nature, replace with designs

Could open Pandora’s box, or could just be mitigated by a much smarter nature.

Status: technologically possible, and cheap, same problems as with .

BIONICS(mind-controlled) exoskeletons, prosthetics, body-parts and super-senses.

Partly in realm of engineering and as such will see the same (albeit more uneven) exponential progress (3D-printing, materials, electronics etc). The neurological / biological part of the tech will remain difficult.

Successful neural interfaces within a decade.

Status: successful on disabled people but won’t be popular among healthy people soon because mechanics still very inferior to organics.

H+ (transhumanism or ‘the augmented human’) very real.

GREY GOO, SELF-REPLICATING MACHINES

In 1986 Eric Drexler cautioned against self-replicating (nanotech) machines in his 1986 book ‘Engines of Creation’.

Nanotech is about engineering things at the molecular level (just above quantum-level). As opposed to biotech which is about instructing nature to engineer them.

Nanotech is mechanical engineering at the molecular level.

The technological equivalent of nature’s proteïnes.

Status: didn’t happen. The nanotech revolution got stuck on coatings, food-additives and cosmetics. No machinery yet.

PLATFORM IS THE NEW FACTORY

A platform is an organization that crowdsources its resources and coordinates crowd collaboration.

Extremely scalable. Extremely lightweight: only a business core.

Problems: single point of control, potentially a tool for ‘enslaving’ and dronifying the many by the few.

Status: very mature concept, implementations resisted by ‘something’, will go gradually.

http://airbnb.comhttp://uber.com

THE COLLABORATIVE ECONOMYAn economy in which machines,

algorithms and people are producing and sharing things without much bureaucracy or central planning.

An ecosystem of platforms.

Task-based economy, not job-based. Very compatible with robots and AI.

Like the industrial economy, it too will be owned by a few people.

Status: taking over right now, resisted big time. Think decades not years.

DISTRIBUTED COLLABORATIONAny time, any place, any context collaboration without central planning. Economic freedom.

Platform-based creation, decentrally coordinated using stigmergic principles.

‘Just go online and add value, you will be rewarded’

Status: immature technology and inflexible existing H&R, fiscal regulations are limiting

success. Status quo situation for last decade.

https://github.comhttps://assembly.com

https://mobbr.com

GLOBAL DECENTRALISED AUTONOMY

A global base layer of decentralized autonomous platforms that automates and democratizes social utility and service functions, such as governments, banks, payment-systems, energy grids, health-care, transportation, cloud-services, exchanges, markets, etc.

Based on open-source software, distributed collaboration and blockchain technology.

The great equalizer.

Status: needs maturation of blockchain technology, will be resisted by ‘the powers that be’. Not anytime soon.

BITCOIN

Cash money over the internet.

No need for banks or governments.

First application of ‘the blockchain’.

Decentralizing technology.

Status: proven, stable, secure technology. Ready for take off. All it needs is a good old fashioned financial crisis.

THE BLOCKCHAIN

The decentralized ledger. Eliminates the need for trusted or intermediate parties when transacting.

Blockchains enable property (incl. money) to be

exchanged and assigned instantly, undisputable, secure and internetted.

Makes any property ‘cash’ property.

“On the blockchain, nobody knows you’re a fridge”, allows machines to become economic actors.

Status: immature technology, will be huge, but not any time soon. Solution looking for a problem.

DECENTRALISED AUTONOMOUS CORPORATIONS

Algorithmic companies that run in a blockchain. Decentralized. No single point of failure, control or censorship.

Bitcoin-network itself was the first ever robocorp.

Solves the ‘single point of control’ problem that platforms can have. The future of freedom.

Banks, payment-systems, energy grids, governments, transportation, cloud-services, exchanges, markets, etc.

Status: first prototypes up-and-running won’t take-off yet.

https://erisindustries.comhttps://lazooz.org

ANTI-GRAVITY DEVICES

‘Electrogravitics’. Manipulating gravity like we can manipulate electromagnetism and light.

To be able to generate, shield, store, emit etc. gravity.

Gravity is not described by quantum theory unlike all other (known) fundamental forces. Only scientific theory is in classical physics not particle physics.

Status: waiting for a very fundamental scientific breakthrough

OVERUNITY ENERGY DEVICES

The absolute holy grail of innovation and technology: devices that produce more energy than they use by drawing from ‘the zero-point field’.

Limitless, free energy.

Would instantly promote mankind to a type I or II civilization on the Kardashev scale.

‘The legacy of Nikolai Tesla’

Status: still very much in the realm of myth and conspiracy theory.

‘Proven in hundreds of laboratories around the world’ -- Dr. Brian O’Leary, Ph.D, scientist, author, Princeton/Cornell physics professor, and former NASA astronaut.

SINGULARITY

The end of the anthropocene, the beginning of the mekhanocene.

‘Machine making man obsolete.’

Not a technology but an event, expected around 2040.

‘The church of Kurzweil’

Status: still more a meme than a probable event, has become a license

to limitless exaggerate human progress.

BIOLOGY IS THE ULTIMATE TECHNOLOGY

Nature invented 3D printing billion years ago (morphogenesis). Has been running an internet for millions of years (mycelia).

Is using quantum technology for millions of years (bird navigation). Etc.

A human cell has 10 billion moving parts, more complicated than a modern nuclear submarine. Your body has 370 trillion such cells.

Science not very successful in understanding nature because she doesn’t fit the mechanistic paradigm. Her most common trick (self-

organization, homeostasis, anti-chaos) has no scientific explanation.

Nature is the master of exponentiality and crowdsourcing. It’s everywhere.

For solutions, always look to nature first! Bio-mimicry.

‘The more technology evolves, the more it will become biological’

THE BATTLE FOR CONTROLMORE DECENTRALISING TECHNOLOGY THAN EVER THREATENING THE ELITE

centralized vs. distributed, control vs. autonomy, slavery vs. freedom, 1% vs. 99%

THE SCIENCE DELUSION

The science crisis: our clockwork universe is broken.

The current scientific paradigm of determinism, reductionism and mechanism has proven it’s worth but is also failing us.

Dogma and consensus have taken over in climate science, economics, medicine, genetics and many other sciences. Impossible to produces true theories (predicting models).

The problem: science has no fundamental understanding of and no mathematical frameworks for some of the most common phenomena in nature such as anti-chaos (self-organization).

Status: mankind will eventual linger into the age of holistic science till than dogma and believe are powerful innovation absorbers.

TERMINATOR TECHNOLOGY

Big corporations trying to prevent self-replication of organisms they created or patented by genetically modifying them.

‘Life will find a way’.

No obvious advantages other than creating scarcity and enforcing licenses.

Farmers can no longer optimize crops .

What if the trait of non-reproducibility is contagious or inheritable?

Status: already deployed at large scale by Monsanto, for instance in Iraq, denying farmers reuse of their own agricultural seeds.