The Coming Wave
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Really wanted to read this, and was ultimately a bit disappointed. I think partly due to the cognitive dissonance of the author breathlessly hyping AI, while at the same time warning of all the terrible things it would do, all while being one of the pioneers at the forefront of the technology and leading A.I at Microsoft.
Highlights
AI will keep getting radically better at everything, and so far there seems no obvious upper limit on what’s possible.
In the words of John McCarthy, who coined the term “artificial intelligence”: “As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.”31 AI is—as those of us building it like to joke—“what computers can’t do.” Once they can, it’s just software.
Since 2010, more countries10 have slid backward on measures of democracy than have progressed, a process that appears to be accelerating.
Between 1980 and 202112 the share of national income earned by the top 1 percent has almost doubled and now sits just under 50 percent.
Across data from more than one hundred countries, evidence suggests that the lower a country’s social mobility, the more it experiences upheavals like riots, strikes, assassinations, revolutionary campaigns, and civil wars. When people feel stuck, that others are unfairly hogging the rewards, they get angry.
Global challenges are reaching a critical threshold. Rampant inflation. Energy shortages. Stagnant incomes. A breakdown of trust. Waves of populism. None of the old visions from either left or right seem to offer convincing answers, yet better options seem in short supply.
A meta-analysis published18 in the journal Nature reviewed the results of nearly five hundred studies, concluding there is a clear correlation between growing use of digital media and rising distrust in politics, populist movements, hate, and polarization.
managing the coming wave requires confident, agile, coherent states, accountable to the people, filled with expertise, balancing interests and incentives, capable of reacting fast and decisively with legislative action and, crucially, close international coordination.
The top 10 percent of global firms take 80 percent of the total profits.
Given the population and resource constraints,19 just standing still would probably require a global two- to threefold productivity improvement, and standing still is not acceptable for the world’s vast majority,
Indeed, you may spend more time looking at the collective screens in your life than at any given human, spouses and children included.