First, the objection:

Collecting good ideas adds little value. Ideas are all talk. Like talk, they are cheap. Only doing things counts, and even then only doing effective things counts. Everything else is noise that is as likely to slow progress as it is to speed it along.

Let’s think about that. On the podcast we talk about this convergence of phenomena that drive us toward a very different future.

• Individual people are becoming capable of doing more.
• Doing things is easier than it used to be.
• We can do things faster than we used to be able to.
• Doing things requires less infrastructure and energy than it used to.

I can give examples of all that, but assuming you generally agree with those propositions, let’s move on. Also, these are probably not separate phenomena at all, but different manifestations of an underlying driver: Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns or Buckminster Fuller’s Ephemeralization—which are probably just two different names for the same underlying teleological principle.

Another way to describe that principle is emergent magic. For our purposes, we’ll say that magic is the ability to think or speak reality into being. Per that definition, magic does not currently exist in our world. Nobody (that I know of) can just think about something or speak an idea out loud and have it happen.

But we are much closer to that capability than we have ever been before. All that stuff about people being more capable, things being easier to do, things happening faster, things requiring less infrastructure—that all adds up to fewer steps between thinking about something and that thing happening. Maybe one day, after the Technological Singularity, we will get to straight-up practical magic that will be very close to “real” magic as I have defined it above. Via an elaborate post-AI, post-nanotech infrastructure, people will be able to think or speak just about anything into being.

But before any of that, we have emergent magic, with the gap between thought and reality getting narrower.

Okay, so here’s my strange idea. (That’s right, none of the above counts as a “strange idea” in my book. It’s all a given.)

Is the value of ideas diminished by their ubiquity as the “ideas are a dime a dozen” argument would have it, or is it diminished by the low probability that they will amount to anything?

We will set aside the apparent relative value of ideas. Ideas for novel medical treatments or energy technologies should be, of course, a lot more valuable than,”I’ve got a great idea for a new app; it will be the next Angry Birds!”

But the question of relative value is complex—sometimes when important ideas are implemented poorly, they end up doing harm; sometimes seemingly frivolous ideas have unintended consequences that make them extremely useful. That’s hard math and we’ll skip it for now.

If low probability negatively impacts the value of ideas, then—because of emergent magic—ideas are becoming more valuable every day. As the gap between thinking them up and executing on them closes, they become more probable. As they become more probable, they become more valuable.  They may be a dime a dozen today, but next year they will be worth a dime each. And then they’ll be worth a dollar each. And then a hundred of dollars.

Of course, even if they are becoming more valuable, there are so many ideas becoming valuable at the same time that, once again, the sheer number of ideas becomes a problem. Today we struggle to find the one valuable idea in a sea of useless ideas. In the near future, we may struggle to find the one billion-dollar idea in a sea of million-dollar ideas.

Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash

In fact, encourage them to give away one to three copies, depending on how much they liked the book.

If the book is well-liked, it will go viral. If it is not it will fizzle out almost immediately. This is a test-case for the Gift Economy, albeit an incomplete one.

This may be the model we use for distributing The World Transformed: the Abridged Edition.

If not, I think I will try it out on a subsequent book.

And down the road, people might start swapping out organs just as part of a maintenance program. If young blood can make you more youthful, what might a whole new heart do? For that matter, can we produce our own “young” blood?

Can we print out new eyes with perfect vision, new ears with perfect hearing?

Nice straight new teeth?

And why stop at old body, new parts? How long before we can print out (not clone, mind you) a whole new body and just pop our brains into it?

The ideal fit would be with self-starting startups. As a dedicated AI system (or many such systems) launch profitable companies, their ownership is distributed throughout the population according to whatever criteria make the most sense. It could be random or tied to consumer behavior or other interests / aptitudes.

Or possibly one could gain ownership in businesses by expressing an early interest in them or contributing to the original idea from which they are launched. You might think of it as the auto-pilot of entrepreneurship. The machine does all the hard stuff while we reap the benefits.

For a related idea, see Wealth Robots.

For a road map of how we get from here to there, check out Melanie Swan’s recent piece on Blockchain Thinkers and Smart Contracts.

Studios will soon have to start licensing these one-off versions of movies, as well as one-off games based on them or face losing to pirates who will do so anyway.

But then if you can put your own likeness and voice into classic movies to provide a more egocentric way of enjoying them, you can also put yourself into wholly original movies. These movies might be based on stories that you have come up with yourself or built up from stories suggested by the movie-making system based on your expressed interests. They could be simple fantasy fulfillment, such as a love story involving you and a fantasy figure from your own life or popular culture. Or they could be the chance to re-experience memories: happy memories, painful memories, memories of important events.

What if I hadn’t taken that job? What if we had gotten married? What if I had majored in business?

Sit down and talk it over with a virtual version of you who took the road not taken. The projected alternative won’t be in any sense “accurate,” of course, but any reasonable extrapolation on what might have happened would have something to teach you. You might be surprised what you learn.

If people could virtually eat any and everything they want, any time, and the physical experience was identical to the real experience of eating — including feelings of fullness and satiety — it would make it much easier for people to eat healthily and moderately when really eating.

But the experience will have to be convincing. The technology to allow for such an experience is still some ways off. Currently the cutting edge of virtual reality has to do with creating an immersive visual and aural experience. That’s great, but it is no substitute for eating…

Existing VR interfaces stimulating the sense of touch are still fairly crude. And if there is any progress being made on VR taste and smell experiences, I haven’t heard about it. Eating will have to provide a highly refined synthesis of all three senses — plus vision and hearing for good measure. Such an interface is more likely to feed directly into the brain than into our various sensory organs.

The possibility of unlimited eating may prove to be one of the prime motivators for developing such technology, which may (paradoxically) lead to a big reduction in overeating. In fact, full-immersion virtual eating may lead to the end of overeating altogether.

Arguably, the arms race between intelligent trading systems is working on a goal similar to this, although those bots are concerned only with enriching their makers — not everybody.

Or go back a step: what if we deployed machines working on creating recursively smarter machines focused on the task of making us all wealthier? Machines can only tell us what they think we should do. They can’t force us. But then, machines who can make us rich could make a pretty good case that they should be in charge.

There are also sites that provide virtual girlfriends. One variety a downloadable AI software who provides some level of girlfriend-like interaction. The other variety relies on real women, but seems to be largely about establishing a paper trail to prove that you actually have a girlfriend.

Why not virtual online friends for the truly lonely? The page for the AI girlfriend linked above claims to be providing that, but I don’t think anyone would much go for it absent the implied sexual component.  Just somebody to talk to and spend some time with. Today they would be pretty crude, but they will only get better. They could make life easier and more enjoyable for a lot of lonely people.

And developing programs just to be friends with people seems like a good step to take towards friendly AI, doesn’t it?

Tremendous human potential is held back by a lack of confidence. We need a brain hack to make people more confident, to give them the unshakable belief that they can access their own untapped potential. People who overcome their fear of failure can do extraordinary things. If we unleash those possibilities, we will see a lot more failure as well as some amazing successes.

Or do we first need a brain hack to help people behave rationally? There might be some tension there. We don’t want super-confident people trying every stupid, dangerous idea that pops into their heads.

But there is a lot of good stuff that is not being attempted for lack of confidence. That’s a loss we can’t afford.

Post-scarcity is a theoretical alternative form of economics or social engineering in which goods, services and information are universally accessible.[1] This would require a sophisticated system of resource recycling, in conjunction with technologically advanced automated systems capable of converting raw materials into finished goods.

Here’s the problem. Although we can describe what the enabling technologies for post-scarcity will be (nanotech, biotech, artificial intelligence) and while it is fairly easy to provide a sketch of what a post-scarcity world will look like, the question of how, exactly, we get there from here leads to a lot of hemming and hawing.

We need a roadmap that starts with the technology and economy we have now and that leads us, step-by-step, into post-scarcity. The roadmap needs to include thoughts on how we avoid various pitfalls (that is, scarcity scenarios) that a post-scarcity society might fall into.

There should be a prize for the biggest contributions to the datafication of our world. Datafication involves replacing physical infrastructure with virtual or simply changing the relative value between the physical and data properties of any product or service.

For example, Netflix might have been nominated for such a prize when they shifted their business model from being about disks in the mail to being about streaming of content. They removed the physical aspects of their business and left only data. This is a critical trend in our world, and the largest contributors to it should be recognized and rewarded.

R. Buckminster Fuller called this process “ephemeralization.” Maybe the prize should be named after him.

And it has been suggested that they are one of the secret ingredients behind the success of Silicon Valley:

R. U. Sirius talked about this a bit on the most recent edition of The World Transformed. On the other hand, there is this quip: “Many people tried acid. Only one became Steve Jobs.”

Maybe what we need is Hallucinogens 2.0, a technology for safely and reliably tapping into the parts of our brains that hallucinogens are known uniquely to impact. We need a computer interface into our own brains to provide the insights of a hallucinogenic trip without the risks.

Anybody working on anything like that?

…I’m convinced that new information will beat new algorithms and new metrics based on existing information almost every time. Indeed, new information can be so powerful that, once it is found, analytics professionals should stop worrying about improving existing models with existing data and focus instead on incorporating and testing that new information.

By “new information,” he means information that didn’t exist before or that we now have to a level of depth never before possible. Sensor data in Internet of Things environments can represent either of these kinds of data. For example, we may have always used temperature data in performing some calculation, but back in the day we used a daily average. Now we have sensors providing temperature data every few minutes (or seconds.) That’s data to a greater depth. For data that we didn’t have before, Bill cites sensors on cars that track wear and tear as the vehicle is driven. Previously, vehicle repair occurred in a primarily reactive way. Now we can begin to anticipate repairs before they are needed.

Somehow this reminds me of a talk that Eliezer Yudkowsky gave at the Singularity Summit back in 2007. He said:

In the intelligence explosion the key threshold is criticality of recursive self-improvement. It’s not enough to have an AI that improves itself a little. It has to be able to improve itself enough to significantly increase its ability to make further self-improvements, which sounds to me like a software issue, not a hardware issue. So there is a question of, Can you predict that threshold using Moore’s Law at all?

Geordie Rose of D-Wave Systems recently was kind enough to provide us with a startling illustration of software progress versus hardware progress. Suppose you want to factor a 75-digit number. Would you rather have a 2007 supercomputer, IBM’s Blue Gene/L, running an algorithm from 1977, or a 1977 computer, an Apple II, running a 2007 algorithm? And Geordie Rose calculated that Blue Gene/L with 1977′s algorithm would take ten years, and an Apple II with 2007′s algorithm would take three years.

There is a progression here, albeit a counter-intuitive one. We might be inclined to think that hardware adds more value than “mere” software and that software is inherently more valuable than “mere” (or the term we like to throw around a lot is “raw”) data. The opposite turns out to be the truth. The data itself is where the value is. Hardware and software only help us to focus on the potentialities, the possibilities, that it already contains.

Just about any process can be improved by being accelerated. Doing things faster means being able to do more. Getting faster means becoming more capable. If you can read faster, you can read more books in the same time. If you work faster, you can produce more work.

Each year the prizes would be awarded to those who accelerated the most important processes, or who achieved the greatest incremental acceleration on a process that has already been boosted.

There would probably have to be categories: medical, financial, industrial, agricultural. Getting a crop to grow in three weeks might seem painfully slow compared to completing a transaction in a thousandth of a second. But it’s all relative.