Nobody Asked For It

Nobody’s asked for it. 

Self driving cars? Last time I checked most people enjoy driving their cars, watching racing in F1 and Nascar, getting wages from Uber and urban transportation jobs. Not to mention, like any new technology, there remains major pushback on safety concerns and terrifying stories of this technology going wrong already.

How about AI and robots? Yeah it’s nice that they offer companionship but what happened to making friends and going out for a drink in the real world? More importantly, was anyone asking for these things to replace work altogether? Like yeah helping with chores around the house would be nice but we don’t want them taking our jobs yet.

Most people still believe it’s worthwhile to develop these technologies for their creative potential and building businesses, even though a single image generated by AI, for example, can use as much electricity as running your fridge for half an hour. As demand grows, these systems could put enormous strain on the power grid, driving up energy prices and triggering wider crises related to supply and demand, climate impacts from grid expansion, and environmental harm from resource extraction. In response, the largest technology companies have begun making significant investments in nuclear power this year to meet the surge in energy demand. At the same time, substantial funding is also flowing into photonic, quantum, and biocomputing solutions, searching for ways to address the immense computational and energy needs of these new technologies.

This graphic took up to 36 Wh or about 1 hour of fridge runtime.

AI, automated mobility, and robots are also geopolitical national security risks.

It took us until the brink of our power grid and geopolitical safety risk that we are forced to stop innovating for the sake of convenience (such as building random softwares for social networking and teamwork efficiency) and we are entering an era of building for the betterment of these technologies - it’s just not for the good reasons they were always imagined in sci-fi and cartoons. We used to think in the 1900s that the future of technology would bring all these wonderful gadgets and conveniences to improve life, yet we only got different versions of the same tech in phones and computers. Mainly software showed any transformative innovation from the last 20 years. Not much of the softwares are truly futuristic and life changing and have not substantially helped solve many worldwide problems including famine, climate change, inequality and exploitation. While software and the internet has made these issues more well known and arguably more common, there are arguments e claiming that technology has exacerbated these issues. We are beginning to see a resurgence of innovations combined with software technologies, but not for the beneficial societal reasons we would hope. 

The incoming tech is to be built rather because we’re at the brink of our current system, and now are being forced to innovate because of power needs, geopolitical risk, and to not choke ourselves from within. This realization will have positive impacts on society despite coming as a response to crisis rather than proactive vision. Expect any positive innovations for the public to be pushed in a narrative similar to how greenwashing is used in advertising and be skeptical of the primary reason for the development of AI and droids. As a result, the race to innovate to the most advanced technologies of tomorrow is not guided by positive morals or beneficial incentives, it is to innovate without putting time aside to contemplate the scenarios of negative externalities that we’ve outlined in the other blog.

It’s a time now of building things that matter. 

These demands will drive innovations in energy production and also be beneficial to climate change through greener tech and new innovations such as biohacking. We already see this in Neuralink, Cortical Labs and Anduril. We will invent things that are going to boost the standard of living in the real world, just maybe not for the good of the people. While innovation in the world of convenient consumer software technologies may come to a steady halt. The visions of the future from the late 1800s to early 2000s are going to be realized in increasingly new ways in the next 10 years of innovation. 

It's time to pull ideas from earlier time periods, in history, philosophy and especially sci-fi, science, and religion to apply to our understanding of the new technologies of tomorrow. Eventually, sci fi as a genre may go completely extinct as we bring all the possible ideas to life through mankind's ability to innovate any technology. That is, if we don't destroy ourselves in the process.