Part three of Anticipating 2025 will summarize the third section of the book. This section focused on redesigning artificial intelligence, with a look at six important questions and the exploration of human-machine mergers. The six questions explored in this section are:
- Can we create a human-level artificial intelligence?
- If so, when?
- Will human-level artificial intelligence lead to super-intelligence?
- If super-intelligence arrives, will we like it?
- Can we upload our minds to computers?
- Can we de-risk the arrival of super-intelligence?
Like the first two sections, this section forces us to look at disruption through a different lens. Granted, the path forward is highly speculative, and even the most optimistic scenarios are likely years away from having transformative implications. Nonetheless, it does force us to broaden our lens beyond traditional views. For example, I’ve focused on the automation of knowledge work and all its ramifications, while the authors (Calum Chace, Martin Dinov, and Elias Rut) focus on creating super-intelligence by uploading our minds to computers. They explore a human-machine merger that they see as the enabler of super-intelligence benefits realization. This merger in the author’s view is the only way to avoid creating our successor. So yeah, that’s a little more impactful than automating knowledge work.