Human history has three main players: humans, the environment, and technology. In prehistory the locus of control resided entirely in the external environment, and this permitted a natural circular economy with a balanced carbon cycle to be maintained. But the start of the Industrial Revolution allowed us to use new technologies to take greater control of our environment. This broke the natural circular economy and altered the carbon cycle - we did not know how to effectively handle the waste products of civilization. Today we are beginning to see new ways to close the loop again with the creation of more intelligent systems that augment natural feedback loops and substitute computing power for raw materials. So we can return to a circular economy... but it won't be the circular economy we knew before the Industrial Revolution.
Maurice Conti described this new circular economy: "If this is the future, the Augmented Age, what will that look like? I think we're going to see a world where we're moving from things that are fabricated to things that are farmed. Where we're moving from things that are constructed to that which is grown. We're going to move from being isolated to being connected. And we'll move away from extraction to embrace aggregation. I also think we'll shift from craving obedience from our things to valuing autonomy." Autonomy implies sharing control, and in this context sharing control with proactive AI systems. Why should we do that? Because the task of restoring a circular economy is too big for us to do unaided.
Giulio Boccaletti, physicist and atmospheric and ocean scientist: "One area where the convergence of need, urgency, and opportunity is great is in the monitoring and management of our planetary resources. Despite the dramatic increase in cognitive and labor productivity, we have not fundamentally changed our relationship to Earth: we are still stripping it of its resources to manufacture goods that turn to waste relatively quickly, with essentially zero end-of-life value to us. A linear economy on a finite planet, with seven billion people aspiring to become consumers — our relationship to the planet is arguably more productive, but not much more intelligent than it was a hundred years ago. Understanding what the planet is doing in response, and managing our behavior accordingly, is a complicated problem, whose solution is hindered by colossal amounts of imperfect information. From climate change, to water availability, to the management of ocean resources, to the interactions between ecosystems and working landscapes, our computational approaches are often inadequate to conduct the exploratory analyses required to understand what is happening, to process the exponentially growing amount of data about the world we inhabit, and to generate and test theories of how we might do things differently."
No, we're not doing things much differently than we did a hundred years ago, but at the same time we won't willingly return to our pre-industrial past. What is needed is a sustainably managed closed loop industrial ecology. Proactive AI systems capable of generating actionable intelligence can help synchronize interactions at the individual, social, and environmental levels and restore a circular economy. There are many examples of how this is happening, but that's another story...
Story #2: Gaining a planetary perspective
In his 2010 book "Eaarth," Bill McKibben described how humans have fundamentally changed the planet. There's the familiar concept of "planetary boundaries" that Johan Rockström has described. And the work of Carl Sagan, while associated most frequently with astronomy, has a lot more to say about the care of our planet than is generally assumed. Some of his greatest contributions were in defining our relationship to the planet as a whole. Wallace Broecker and Charles Langmuir, in the 2012 edition of "How to Build a Habitable Planet," echoed Sagan. And more recently in late 2016, astrobiologist David Grinspoon wrote "Earth in Human Hands," a book devoted to describing how we have been unconsciously making a new planet, but now we are discovering our new role as conscious shapers of our world. Grinspoon's book is probably the single best resource for explaining the context in which all of these anticipated future changes will occur.
The control mix graphs similarly lack detail or scale, but are intended to show how small human and AI disturbances, to otherwise relatively stable environmental conditions, can affect large scale conditions. During the Holocene those disturbances were relatively negligible, though nonetheless contributed to the extinction of many megafauna species. During the Anthropocene the human population exploded, the environment was dramatically altered, and biological diversity threatened still further. During the Sapiezoic symbiotic artificial intelligences (or any new cultural developments yeilding positive synergistic effects) could help us regain control over these unintended environmental externalities, close material and energy loops, and create industrial ecologies capable of enhancing environmental services, integrating large amounts of information in the process.
As Luca De Biase explains, artificial intelligence can help humans understand externalities (in many cases already has) and that will challenge their civilizations. At the same time, per Maurice Conti, we are shifting from craving obedience from our things to valuing autonomy - and that is what will allow civilizations to meet the challenge of handling these unintended externalities. ...This is a planetary perspective with shared control, it expands our understanding and ability.
Story #3: Terra Sapiens
Traditional notions of time, space, and agency have been extended beyond the outer edge of our experience. We are re-inventing ourselves, again.
Online Resources:
https://aeon.co/essays/enter-the-sapiezoic-a-new-aeon-of-self-aware-global-change
http://info.gravyty.com/blog/not-just-ai-proactive-ai
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmICwmT-BHA (Andrew Lo's TEDx video, "Hacking Humanity")
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/01/21/face-ai-enabled-machines-cooperate-better-humans-tests/
http://longnow.org/seminars/02017/sep/06/earth-human-hands/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/12/06/were-at-the-controls-on-planet-earth-but-were-not-in-control/
https://www.hollywoodsoapbox.com/?p=16983
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/12/negative_thinking_about_climate_change_is_dangerous.html
Notable writers/thinkers on future topics:
Rachel Armstrong
Koert van Mensvoort
Karl Schroeder
Eors Szathmary
Sir Francis Bacon
David Channell
Bruce Mazlish
Beatrix Murrell
Teilhard de Chardin
Kevin Kelly
Lynn Margulis
Vladimir Vernadsky
David Grinspoon
Carl Sagan
Wallace Broecker
Maurice Conti
