This is a general theory floating around that in the coming years the exponential growth in various technologies will converge to create the fourth industrial revolution. This will lead to changes more dramatic and more rapid than most can imagine and greater than we have certainly ever witnessed. You can study trends and history and make delineations, argue about starting points, but I happy to suggest that when historians look back, they wont label last year as the explosion, or any of the preceding years but I expect that year is very close.
The key technologies probably rest around artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Soon these technologies will allow a select few companies and countries ahead of the trend to handle vast data and solve problems that will effectively remove humans from the process. The advantages in the market and in military capabilities are surely vast. It's rational for all parties to assume that this is a zero sum game. And that the winner can wipe out the majority of the gains made by all other parties historically. This makes me think the USA has the most to lose and that the current advantages it has even in the relevant future fields could be lost by other parties piggybacking on US progress and then making the key breakthroughs first and then basically advancing at an exponential rate off into the distance.
The extension of the fourth revolution to being a zero sum game winner takes all is probably an exaggeration although I maintain its rational for all parties to operate on that assumption. If so can a strong case not be made for massive and overwhelming investment of defense budgets in this direction?
I think we can expect the fourth revolution to hurdle us towards the fifth, surely the country to get ahead will most likely get there first. I label the fifth as Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) (AI(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity), an AI system billions of times smarter than the sum of all humanity, potentially dangerous to humanity, and obviously revolutionary. Nobody obviously agrees on likely dates but a median predictions/outright guess by experts in the field is 2040-2060 depending on the survey https://medium.com/ai-revolution/whe...t-ae5a6f128503. If one nation gets full control of this over others, we should assume they would rule the world. Far more likely is the threat of instability and even war in the years preceding its development if nations were getting close, and one nation felt another was going to get there before it. Its likely there will need to be major international agreements and a global Manhattan project that allow co-operation and control and the democratization of this tech and make it safe before its developed.
Looking at the short term and the developing arms race, are countries like China and Russia (especially China) better positioned in the coming years because they are effectively dictatorships in some form that can direct and control investment and push in down specific corridors? The Chinese are building the worlds largest quantum research facility at the moment and hope to build a quantum computer by 2020 with millions times more power than all the computers in the world combined. They also have far more control in directing their "private" industry. Private industry also has potential to make these kinds of breakthroughs first and that potential grows ever year as less capital is required to make tech advances (software not hardware), companies like google move to trillion dollar companies and the private industry can easily compete for the worlds best minds and soon it will be about the worlds best self learning AI software to advance things further.
The key technologies probably rest around artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Soon these technologies will allow a select few companies and countries ahead of the trend to handle vast data and solve problems that will effectively remove humans from the process. The advantages in the market and in military capabilities are surely vast. It's rational for all parties to assume that this is a zero sum game. And that the winner can wipe out the majority of the gains made by all other parties historically. This makes me think the USA has the most to lose and that the current advantages it has even in the relevant future fields could be lost by other parties piggybacking on US progress and then making the key breakthroughs first and then basically advancing at an exponential rate off into the distance.
The extension of the fourth revolution to being a zero sum game winner takes all is probably an exaggeration although I maintain its rational for all parties to operate on that assumption. If so can a strong case not be made for massive and overwhelming investment of defense budgets in this direction?
I think we can expect the fourth revolution to hurdle us towards the fifth, surely the country to get ahead will most likely get there first. I label the fifth as Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) (AI(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity), an AI system billions of times smarter than the sum of all humanity, potentially dangerous to humanity, and obviously revolutionary. Nobody obviously agrees on likely dates but a median predictions/outright guess by experts in the field is 2040-2060 depending on the survey https://medium.com/ai-revolution/whe...t-ae5a6f128503. If one nation gets full control of this over others, we should assume they would rule the world. Far more likely is the threat of instability and even war in the years preceding its development if nations were getting close, and one nation felt another was going to get there before it. Its likely there will need to be major international agreements and a global Manhattan project that allow co-operation and control and the democratization of this tech and make it safe before its developed.
Looking at the short term and the developing arms race, are countries like China and Russia (especially China) better positioned in the coming years because they are effectively dictatorships in some form that can direct and control investment and push in down specific corridors? The Chinese are building the worlds largest quantum research facility at the moment and hope to build a quantum computer by 2020 with millions times more power than all the computers in the world combined. They also have far more control in directing their "private" industry. Private industry also has potential to make these kinds of breakthroughs first and that potential grows ever year as less capital is required to make tech advances (software not hardware), companies like google move to trillion dollar companies and the private industry can easily compete for the worlds best minds and soon it will be about the worlds best self learning AI software to advance things further.
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