LONDON: As you’re choking down your latest serving of Trump Clinton Brexit Racism Terrorism Wealth Gap Climate Change Casserole, you could use some good news.
Let’s start with The Inevitable, the new best-seller by Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine some 20 years ago and one of our wisest technological prognosticators. “This is the moment that folks in the future will look back at and say, ‘Oh to have been alive and well back then!’” Kelly writes. “There has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefit/risk ratios, better returns, greater upside than now. Right now, this minute.”
In the mid-2010s, we’re getting the first sneak peeks at a bouquet of technologies that can vastly improve the lives of most people on the planet and solve some of our hardest problems – even climate change.
Just consider for a moment how much everyday life has been transformed since 2007, when smartphones, social networks and cloud computing took off at about the same time. What we’re going to experience in the next decade, from 2017 to 2027, will make that stuff seem as ho-hum as a wall socket.
Artificial intelligence gets a lot of bad press. Yes, it’s probably going to wipe out certain jobs and professions, as always happens with progress. (Know any darkroom technicians? How about a cooper?) The other side of AI is that it’s going to take civilisation on a great leap forward.
Companies and researchers are collecting unimaginable amounts of data. They’ve got data from every Google search or Facebook like, every action on every cell phone, every online transaction, every motion of every factory machine, plus input from sensors being placed in streetlights and in buoys and on whales and in our bodies.
AI is how we’ll learn from that data in fact, […]
