7 years ago the president of the European Association for Cognitive Systems together with a Professor from Oxford conducted a survey on 550 AI experts.
The results were astonishing: 90% of them answered that the Singularity is going to happen before 2075.
This is a completely game-changer: Artificial General Intelligence would be able even of outperforming the cognitive human abilities.
This means that the next Capitalistic cycle (the present one is going to terminate now, exploiting with a Financial crisis the companies and generating an enormous incentive to reduce the human resources inside the productive processes), is likely to be the definitive one: the ultimate setting of the passage towards a labor-based society to a capital-based (technologies) one.
This phase of human history started with a production 100% generated by human workers and will end with one based on 100% generated by the capital.
The process is not linear and we are missing the big picture of why this is happening now: the time is much faster because the population is much bigger than in the past and the people are much more interconnected thanks to an immediate communication of the information via the internet.
This makes it possible to develop in the next 50 year what the humankind could not develop in the past 1000 and the ancestral brain is not able to project this scenario since is not used to the exponential evolution of the events (the COVID-19 spread is a perfect example of underestimation of an exponential risk).
Looking at how society is structured it comes to mind a big question: how the majority of people (the working class, with the labor as the only or main source of income) it is supposed to survive when will become the useless class.
One of the main “solutions” is “with a Universal Basic Income” (UBI): the government would collect through taxes the money accumulated by the companies using technologies and would equally redistribute it among the population for the only merit of being alive.
This is completely garbage and sub-optimal: taxing the companies will only disincentive them to use technologies slowing down the developments and the innovation and will impact consumers increasing prices.
The Government’s responsibility in this case is not to be the passive entity who just collects money but instead should protect the long-term interest of the country structuring a Financial Singularity Strategy.
If the Technological Singularity happens, that is a non-linear risk, why would be correct to assume as optimal the Universal Basic Income as a rational solution? In fact is not, and instead would be much more effective structuring a gradual driven shift towards an automatic and intelligent solution to invest and redistribute the wealth using the Singularity itself (at least in the end): is necessary to invent a gradual and specular (to the rate of automation inside the supply chain) automatic solution to reinvest the money’s of people with a higher risk of technological long-term unemployment to maximize their self-sufficiency, with educational incentives and diversification of the sources of income.
Decentralization and open-source will be fundamental to the success of this strategy, to guarantee everyone will not have to rely on trust under the governmental black-box decisions.
Finally, since the process will be subjected to frictions, maximizing the sustainability without affecting the incentives to innovation and to production and especially to prevent the generation of social and financial crises brought by increasing inequalities, is the main social challenge for the next 50 years, and who will lead this evolution will determine how the lives of everyone will be for the following decades.