Is technology outpacing human development? We need to talk
This hardly ever means something good. And that won’t be the case here either. We seriously need to talk.
Technology is going faster and faster and ethical and moral debates aren’t occurring at the same rhythm. We need to be ready for a speed of innovation that we can’t control. I’m concerned, and you should be too. Should we, as a social being, force ourselves to slow down? Is that even possible?
This post is about the future. About how crazy exciting it can be, how brilliant our lives will be, if we’re able to talk more and solve many scary issues that technological development implies.
Without falling prey of traditional media technological scaremongering, we need to continually assess the impact of technology in our social fabric. Presently, a series of critical technologies frequently depicted in science fictions are gaining a lot of traction. Their development started decades ago, and they’ve had their ups and downs, but many are now starting to reach consumers.
I started thinking about all this, and writing this blog post 3 years ago. At the time, it was all getting started, and not that many people were thinking about these issues. There were dystopian fictional material, but we saw that as improbable or very far out in the future. Since then, the tech community has become extremely conscious of its repercussions, and these thoughts are translating into mainstream conversations.
This opening of the debate is very much welcomed, and I’d like to expand on why it’s so important that we all think and talk about the many implications of developing Brilliant and Exciting but Scary Technologies.
Where we at
Let me start by talking about the present. We live in the world of the Web, smartphones, apps and smart devices. There are close to 15 billion devices connected to the Internet.
In this world, we are already enhancing our abilities. We can instantly search in respectable sources for a piece of information, we can make complex calculations in the bliss of a second, we can control our home from another country, see and speak with someone on the other side of the planet even if they speak a different language, we can physically go anywhere on the surface of Earth way faster than 100 years ago etc.
And this is just a tiny example of how technology enhances our lives today. Technological development has also allowed us to make incredible achievements:
- Walk on the moon
- Detect gravitational waves
- Prove the existence of the Higgs Boson
- Send a space probe outside of our Solar System
- Induce presence in virtual worlds
- Generate a complete map of the human genome
- Electrical semi-autonomous vehicles
- Real life like CGI effects
- Many medical advances on all fronts and life expectancy raising faster and faster
- AIs that can tell apart elements in an image or partially understand the human language
- Give away a tiny micro computer in a magazine
Technology is already going at an extremely fast pace. Moore’s law has been ongoing for over 40 years which has been great for bringing us here and helping us take this technology to everyone. Young people can’t imagine a world without the Internet, and hardly nobody (at least us lucky people in 1st world countries) would leave their house without their smartphones. Everything is becoming more global with improved communication systems and global economic and political powers have surged.
We have already seen evident issues with this very fast growth, like climate change or a major acceleration of the pace we live in that we don’t seem to be able to catch up to as a society. But climate change is still hard to see in our day to day lives, and our living speed, though it’s probably associated with an increasing amount of mental issues, we’ve ended up seeing it as normal.
But with almost 15000 nuclear weapons on Earth right now, some of these technological advances are already a threat to human civilization. It just takes two crazy presidents, or one even, to start a nuclear war that could eradicate most of the life, if not all, on this planet. And how do you get a crazy president in a democracy where the population has all the information they need to elect the best possible candidate at their fingertips? Well, here comes the man of the hour: fake news. A side effect of hyper communication is that it’s now super easy to create and spread fake news. After several misinformed electoral victories last year, this has now become a serious topic (I love how well The Newsroom foresaw all this).
All this is pretty amazing and scary for many, but this growth promises to keep on being exponential. Better communications improve our performance, and each technological and scientific development unlocks many more. What are we unlocking now?
Brilliant and Exciting but Scary Technologies
BEST, for short (I’ve always wanted to invent an acronym). What could be so brilliant and exciting that also makes it pretty freaking scary? There are several technologies that many people can’t stop speaking about saying they are “the next big thing”:
- AI
- Virtual Reality
- Bio Revolution
- Brain Computer Interface
- Conquering Space
They do sound pretty cool, but in case you’re not convinced, let me tell you what’s going on with each one of them and where they’re heading.
AI
Machine learning has been worked on for decades. The initial maths behind it was developed way before the first electronic computer. There have been many AI Winters and now it seems like it’s Summer again. (Nice summary of AI history) There’s a lot of excitement around AI and so called deep neural networks. And many important AI experts are stating that another AI Winter isn’t coming.
We’re expecting to get AIs that can see and speak like a human, that can understand our context and help us out accordingly. But we also expect them to be way more efficient than us at many things, like organizing inventory, planning and designing a stable bridge, translating, driving, finding new stars… They could also do more physical tasks, specially if we give them a body as robotics progress, like handling crops, a tourist guide, building a bridge, building a rocket, give out information, and much more.
There’s a great blog post by Tim Dettmers looking into how the brain works to calculate its computing power, and comparing it to the evolution of practical computing power (the computing power for tasks we actually do, not just running benchmarks) to guess when we could reach Ray Kurzweil’s beloved technological singularity. Ray thinks we’ll get there by 2045, Tim brings up certain constraints that occur, like energy consumption, the end of Moore’s law and others and sets the date back to 2080. Most AI experts tend to agree that the probable date by which we’ll have reached the singularity will be ~2075 on average. That’s 50 years away, it’s nothing, half a lifetime. My parents might still be alive, and when they were born, room sized computers were just being invented.
Part of the conversation around AI is mind uploading. If we can simulate our minds in a virtual world, that will be like a human level intelligent virtual being. It will require a new definition of existence. And if we can do that, if we just add more computers, that would already be increasing their computing power, making them more intelligent than us.
This would be a whole other inflection point. AIs that are cleverer than us in every aspect. A whole new intelligent species. Or many new super intelligent species.
Virtual Reality
It’s finally here. 2016 was the first year of consumer VR. Millions of mobile VR and hundreds of thousands of desktop VR devices have been sold throughout the year. It has started to go mainstream. Many companies are using VR for publicity, it’s been shown in talk shows, it’s mentioned in TV ads, the media is reporting about it… And for every device sold, many others are trying it, and even though it might not fit their needs today, or it’s still too expensive, they get to see its capabilities.
Trying Virtual Reality for the first time is like accomplishing a childhood dream of living in the future. It seems hard to believe this is real, that we just put the headset on and we’re interacting in a completely different world, maybe even with other humans. And we can do anything in these new worlds. We can render anything we can imagine as long as it has no more than 3 dimensions and the device is powerful enough. It removes so many limits imposed on us in real life.
This is just the beginning. It’s the bare minimum to make VR give you a sense of presence at a decent enough price. There are so many aspects to improve: field of view, resolution, graphics, consumption, weight, price, haptics, positional tracking, body tracking etc. We’ll one day, not too far away, have a headset the size of a pair of glasses that can cover our whole field of view, with life like resolution and graphics, that can position us in the world, track our whole body and make us feel the virtual experience.
Then there’s also Augmented Reality (or whatever fancy marketing name you want to call it, Alt Reality maybe?). There’s a lot of hype around it and companies like Magic Leap. For now there’s Hololens and Meta 2, and some other devices were shown at CES 2017. I also recently read about Avegant’s prototype. It’s definitely not there yet, too expensive and a tiny field of view in the case of Hololens, but it could be another gamechanger.
Augmented Reality allows us to bring all our virtual worlds and virtual objects seamlessly into the real world. This is basically extending reality. Think about it for a second. We’ll substitute many of our current objects for virtual ones that will be better and more practical, but we will also have completely new ones that are just not possible. Everything will change: games, socialising, watching a movie, tourism, meetings and even how we express ourselves (even more than what emoji and memes have done already). It will require a new definition for reality.
We’ll end up with a massive virtual universe, and you’ll be able to live in the real or the virtual one, or in this new combined reality. There could be virtual worlds that simulate the original real world and you could just live in that one as well. And what if you die? If mind uploading exists, will we just upload ourselves to this virtual universe and some physical machine in the original universe keeps us alive.
Bio revolution
We’ve been putting technology into our bodies for quite some time now. Pacemakers are a great example of this and have been accepted as just one more medical advancement that improves our lives.
The latest debate is related to CRISPR/Cas9. This method, developed by many scientists since the early 2000s, allows us to modify DNA by (simplified) using the protein Cas9 which is able to cut DNA, and then a custom slice can be introduced. Currently, only non-reproductive cells have been modified, but there are talks about editing reproductive cells, which would mean changes that can be passed on to the next generations.
Nanorobots have been a promise for a long time, and they’re not here yet, but we’ll be flooded with them in the not too distant future. They could help us battle diseases, fix issues without surgery so it reduces risks and monitor and maintain everything in our bodies at the correct levels. It will also be great to investigate living bodies to learn more about ourselves.
3D printing could help a lot here. Currently, consumer 3D printers are more for plastic objects, but they are also being used for printing circuit boards, food, prototyping technology products… One day we could combine organic elements and print a cell, and then more complex living beings. This is very far away, but interesting to think about. We could print a dog, or many identical dogs. Print a human.
We’ve cloned some animals before, but at this level of manipulation, we could clone a whole being at the state that it finds itself in that specific moment in time. This could be a way to teleport. A machine reads every single atom in your body and recreates it in a different place in the universe, and it would then destroy the first body. That takes the change in the definition of existence even further.
If we’ve got this capability to understand and manipulate living beings, we can do a lot more than just recreate already existing ones. We could modify current existing species, like improving our muscles to make us stronger and more resilient. We could extend our life expectancy, maybe even living forever if can continuously regenerate. We could also develop cryonics (amazing post in Wait But Why about it) and hibernate for centuries. But we would also have the power to create entirely new species with the form and capabilities we desire.
A topic I find particularly interesting is biocomputing. There have already been several successful investigations in this area, where scientists have computed using biological elements. For now, digital computers run mainly on silicon, but that adds a lot of friction between humans and technology. If computing happened in objects made of materials that are similar to what we are made of, we could add all sorts of mechanics to our bodies, or other species (current and new), that will extend it.
Humans will evolve themselves and will decide which species exist, and what each species is. (We’ll be playing Gods here.)
Brain Computer Interface
Being able to control our digital devices just by thinking what we want them to do, is something many people have been dreaming about for a long time. Imagine coming back home and thinking what lights you want to turn on or off, or 30 minutes before arriving, thinking that it’d be nice if the house was warm, and the heater will start up to prepare for your arrival.
Currently we control AI assistants by talking to them, which looks really weird when you’re walking down the street, or by typing, which is a bit of a hassle. We could get all the information instantly just by thinking the question, and having the AI in an earpiece telling us the answer without bothering anyone else around you. We could even take this further and imagine a phone call. It’s bad manners to call on the train or quiet places packed with people. If you could think what you want to say, and your phone converts your thoughts into speech that sounds identical to you, and transmits that to whoever you’re talking with. This could also go through an instant translation system. Or even better, remove language from the equation and we communicate ideas directly, from brain to brain.
It would also help in social situations where taking your phone out is distracting to the people you are with, but it can be good to see some notifications without being too distracted from what you’re doing. This is where wearables were supposed to step in, smart watches or smart glasses. A BCI would be a lot less intrusive. We could also receive notifications in different ways, like the idea of the notification just coming into your head, like when you suddenly remember that it’s your turn to pick up your daughter from school today. Another possibility would be body sensations. If you feel a bit of heat in the tip of your little finger, you know you received a message from your gran.
We would also see a big leap in productivity as we are able to think faster than we can speak or type. We could even skip a lot of steps to fulfil many tasks because we can just think about the end result and expect our computers to take us there.
Elon Musk recently announced Neuralink, after months talking about the neural lace. His mission is to create such device, and he believes he can do it in 10 years for non disability related use cases. (Again, a brilliant Wait But Why post on this, you should just go ahead and read every post by Tim Urban)
Once we all have our brains connected to our digital devices, that would mean we’re all connected to the Internet, which would make us an interconnected species. We could communicate instantly with anyone, and all knowledge that we would want to share would be a part of this massive brain that the human (or neo human) species would become.
Conquering space
This has been talked about since the Cold War, taking our great civilization to the vast Universe that lays outside of our planet. It made us dream bigger. We put satellites in orbit, we sent humans to space, we sent humans to the moon, and then it all stopped. Funding was reduced, interest faded.
We still built an amazing Space Station, a pretty cool initiative that proved that many nations can agree to work together (though Russia and the US have separate sections inside the station). We’ve flooded our lower orbit with satellites and it’s now full of garbage, we’ve sent robots and probes around the Solar System, and even outside of it, but it’s far from where we expected to be now, 50 years ago. There haven’t been any ambitious space plans in the last few decades.
Until now. SpaceX wants to put humans on Mars. When I was a child, NASA’s plans to put humans on Mars were by 2020, and I couldn’t wait for 2020 to come. Elon Musk’s plan is the most ambitious presented until now, and in its current state, it expects to do the maiden flight in 2022, and the first human carrying flight in 2026. I’ve later seen that it will probably be 2028 and it will send Dragon 2s starting in 2018. SpaceX does tend to put back it’s dates, but hey, at least there’s a plan, money being put in, and very clever people working on it. (We’re still waiting for the updated version of the Mars plan) Even more recently, NASA has released its own plans to send humans to Mars in 2034 though they don’t currently have budget for it.
This is bringing this topic to the forefront again. This could be the start of an interplanetary civilization. There’s a very practical reason for this, and it’s the main one Elon Musk always mentions: a backup in case something horrible happens like an asteroid hits Earth (which wouldn’t be that improbable). Another reason is that as we develop, we need more and more resources. We’ve still got a lot left on Earth, and we are definitely not using them efficiently enough, but it’s good to start thinking about new ways to get more resources.
I’ve mentioned where we can get to with AI, and how we can evolve with it and with the bio revolution, which gives us a crazy amount of power. But if we’re able to build larger and larger space ships, and supposedly, we don’t encounter some type of physical limit that the Universe sets upon us, we could even dream of creating planets. We would already be creating tiny stars with nuclear fusion. (That starts to sound even more like being Gods 🤔)
So what?
Brilliant and exciting they are, but why are they scary? Maybe just while reading about them, you started worrying about the implications, specially if you’re not a big fan of technological development altogether. The thing is, these technologies are reaching inflection points where their global impact is extremely hard to foresee, but no doubt that it will be big.
Remember when humankind got very scared that we could all die with the push of a couple buttons during the Cold War? Maybe you weren’t even born, but I’m sure those who were don’t remember it very fondly. Well that was just one crazy technology. Now we’re talking about 5 massive technologies that promise to change who and what we are in the best case scenario, and exterminate our civilization in the worst case.
Many ethical and moral questions come up in the development of these technologies, and I don’t intend to answer them (many very intelligent people are starting to think about it, and I prefer to leave my opinions for future posts), but rather emphasize on the importance of having a strong philosophical foundation prior to fully developing BEST (no point in inventing an acronym if I don’t get to use it).
The implications are wide and long, but I’ve decided to focus on 5 core issues:
Virtual Simulations
We’ll have the ability to simulate our current world, and also to extend it. Many people will think that we should just move to these virtual worlds and abandon the real world.
We’ll be able to act and interact in the same way as in the real world, but with many benefits that come from escaping the physicality of our Universe. It’s an easy solution to make us more empowered, and will allow us to live our wars in whatever way we want. Maybe we spend half of the day playing some kind of adventure game around an alien planet, and then go to a bar in the evening with our friends and talk about the extravagant experiences we lived that day. It could change human relationships in a very deep way, as we would be better connected, we could be ourselves more and will find new ways to communicate.
Virtual worlds could also maybe be used to treat those who have immoral and harmful behaviours like bullies, self harmers or pedophiles. Some researchers think that by allowing people to enact their disorders in a controlled environment without harm to others it is possible to progress with psychological treatment of those behaviours.
It will be hard to find the balance between the physical and the digital universe, and how they will interweave. Is it bad if someone decides to live just in the digital universe? Should we definitely avoid that all humankind moves to this digital universe?
Also, are current immoral and dangerous behaviours ok in virtual simulations where no harm is done to other people or the environment?
Robots and AI
If we continue building more intelligent machines, there will be less and less jobs where humans will be more productive, maybe peaking at none at some point in the future. This is a massive shift in our living rhythm. It’s hard to imagine people without having a job to fight for, it’s an intrinsic part of our culture. What should humans do with their lives with no job obligations?
There’s also an economic issue. If these machines are being put in place is because they generate more income, but those extra resources don’t necessarily (and don’t in reality) go to the people being displaced. And with less and less jobs for humans to do, there needs to be a way for them to access a decent amount of resources to go on with their lives, whatever they may look like in a post-job world. How should the resources amassed by our civilization be distributed?
We’ll create intelligent beings, and if they take the form of robots, they’ll have a physicality that we’ll easily empathize with, should they have rights? Should they have obligations? There’s been a bit of debate recently about corporations paying taxes for the benefits they gain from robots, as a way to distribute wealth.
And being able to create these intelligent beings, should it be restricted in any way? There are already a lot of talks about AI ethics, and the Future of Life Institute recently released some interesting principles that have been signed by many important people in the AI community.
With AIs being more and more intelligent, where does that leave us? Are we just creating a new AI species that will be a lot more powerful and will have the power to enslave us? Another option would be to, instead of putting these general AIs on some computer, robot or whatever body these beings could take, apply this super intelligence to ourselves. We could extend our brains with some hardware (like a Brain Computer Interface) that can seamlessly connect it to an AI and we could act as one.
Another issue is mind uploading and copying. Should we keep on dying, or rely on this technique to live forever? Maybe our family want to preserve us to lessen the loss, should they be able to? What about key historical figures? Should the state have the power to preserve special minds?
Human Evolution
As life expectancy has expanded, our basic understanding of who we are and what it means to be human has been shattered. As we progress from the idea of a single job and a single relationship based on a 40 year life expectancy to being able to reinvent ourselves multiple times throughout our lifetime, the modern psychological dilemma developed. These days we’re talking about living forever, but knowing that life is finite is a core motivation in our lives. How will societies with eternal humans look like?
Should we have children if we’re able to live forever? Our planet has enough resources for a limited amount of beings, so should the number of humans be restricted to the amount supported by the planets we inhabit at any point in time?
And what about cryonics? We could hibernate for centuries. Is this something that should be possible for everyone? If it’s state funded, should there be a limit to the amount of years you can spend in hibernation?
People may get tired of living. Currently euthanasia is already a complicated ethical issue, so should suicide be allowed for humans who are actually feeling fine, but just don’t have the will to keep on living?
Apart from extending our lives, we’ll have the ability to improve ourselves, not just for superficial beauty reasons, or sexuality, but improving our strength, senses, intelligence. Maybe we can just fly to space one day with no extra tools apart from our improved bodies. This would mean ignoring nature and evolving ourselves. We would stop being homo sapiens. What are the ethics here? If the ability to make this happen already exists in the world, I’m sure some people will improve themselves, which would leave the rest at a big disadvantage. That’s why it might be better to accept this change in human nature, and make sure it’s not just the rich and/or powerful who have access to this technology, and everyone that’s willing will be a part of this new species we develop and will continue on developing.
And how will all this affect human relationships? We are social beings, but if we’re changing so much, will we change in such a fundamental issue?
As I mentioned before, it’s just not just modifying current species, but creating whole new living beings. Again, should we or should this be restricted strictly to just a purely academic environment? And what about if instead of creating new borns via sex, we create them in a lab to avoid health issues? Is that ethical? Just for humans or for all living beings?
Maybe we could control the whole food chain, creating new species, destroying others, and that way, make it more productive. But productive for what? For humans? For the planet? Is this just a non issue and it would just be humans wanting to have too much control over everything?
Habitat Sustainability
With the industrial shift that preceded the digital one, we harmed our planet deeply. We’re still not doing any better, and the situation is getting worse, and not enough people are worried about this. There’s an issue between conserving our planet and technological progress and economic growth. The latter has been winning over the former, but with no habitat, there is no economy.
After a lot of effort, the Paris Climate Change Agreement was signed by 196 countries, in which they agreed to keep the temperature raise over pre Industrial levels below 2ºC. Without action, temperature is expected to raise around 5ºC which could be catastrophic. The Arctic’s sea ice extent has gone down by 10% in the last 30 years, and there are projections that sea levels will raise up to 80cm by the end of the century which would mean many meters of lost land, drastically affecting many cities close to the seas (and those aren’t few).
Ideally we’ll fix this issue with more technology like renewable energy and a better use of our resources (the sharing economy), but we could end up with more drastic solutions like fixing the Earth after breaking it, moving to other planets, maybe even creating a new planet. Some solutions seem more ethical than others, as they don’t require killing many more species, including many members of our own.
For centuries, philosophers have said how humankind is a destructive civilization. Hobbes used the old proverb “Homo homini lupus” to say that societies are destructive to one another. Will all this make it even worse, or might it be the opportunity we needed to turn the tides?
State Control
With technology and biology merging into one, and with so much information floating around everywhere in our lives, surveillance will be a critical issue. Most dystopian stories depict a state that heavily controls its population with these many new technologies, and that’s been considered as harmful by most. Thanks to several leaks, we now know that many governments have already attempted, and continue to, implement these kind of surveillance systems.
Many people have continued on with their lives as before, and the phrase “But I’ve got nothing to hide” has been repeated infinite times. I don’t think that means the leaks were not useful. Specially since the Snowden leaks, there’s definitely been a trend to improve security and privacy in software and make it a core component of a product in such a way that you don’t need to even think about it as a user, guaranteeing your freedom.
Governments are now complaining, and ISIS has become a brilliant excuse, that with this, civilians will be less safe as they can’t control terrorists. They want to build backdoors, but many don’t understand that if a maligned person gets access to this backdoor, they could have access to all our information, which could be a lot more dangerous.
The balance between security and privacy (and freedom) is a hard one, and it’s important to debate how much information states (and companies) should have about us, and how private and free we want our lives to be.
We should also consider what form big future states should take. This has been an eternal discussion, and many -isms have been developed that defend different state proportions. Digital technology, and it’s total involvement in our day to day life, brings whole new arguments to the table. Looking at the two extremes, we could end up with:
- Technology is in charge of most of the resource extraction and transformation, which is what creates wealth for our society. We have a very big state that makes sure all this work is being handled correctly, and the generated wealth is properly distributed so all humans can enjoy a peaceful life. (Like a modern Socialism)
- We develop many tools that allow us to organize ourselves in many different ways, and all sorts of communities are formed. Anyone can decide how to live their lives, maybe inside one of these communities, maybe on their own. Nobody mandates how we should live out our life. All this is possible in an efficient way thanks to these tools, as we become more and more interconnected. (What Crypto Anarchists defend) Maybe it reaches a point where all our minds are connected, which could help us empathize with one and another, which would make the state completely redundant.
And…?
We can’t delay progress in science and technology, and there are many reasons for this, but I believe it all comes down to our survival instinct. Reality, and human egoism makes it clearly impossible.
We always want to be on top as that reduces our possibility of dying. We have enemies, and if we stop our development, they won’t and will end up with a competitive advantage that could eventually finish us off. And even if every single country in the world were to reach an agreement, via the UN or some other organisation, to reduce our development speed to make sure it becomes sustainable, there’s still the very real danger of individuals investigating on their own account, and that knowledge could end up in the hands of terrorist groups.
The reality is that there will always be people who will put their own interest over the common interest, and I just can’t think of a way of fixing that. A world where we are able to have a perfectly sustainable growth seems like it can only happen in the most utopian utopia of all.
However, we can and have taken steps as a society to create stronger social foundations to isolate and neutralise the impact of misappropriation of technologies for destructive means.
The second half of the 20th century was all about joining forces, and countries started collaborating a lot more. Some borders were reduced like in the EU, though many many new ones were created when the URSS disappeared. Many trade agreements were developed between countries and many country associations like the UN, EU or SEAN were created. This was as peaceful as we had even been.
Naturally, globalisation followed, and inasmuch as it had the potential for a positive effect globally, the reality was that it brought 2 critical problems. The first is that many weren’t invited to participate in the economic expansion, so they weren’t a part of that economic improvement but rather victims of it. The second issue is that it continues to act similarly to how an electoral system works, empowering the larger parties to create stable parliaments. In this case, it makes large corporations larger, and kills many smaller companies including some states
After the last global recession in western countries, the centrist trend stopped. Many people stopped believing in the current system. This allowed for populist leaders to surge in many countries. Sadly, a populist trend that has propagated around the west combines the fear of globalisation and terrorism, to isolate ourselves and discriminate anyone marginally different. This idea only plays well for a few domestic elites. And once again egoism is winning.
How we develop these technologies is a crucial aspect of the research behind their development. Technologies are biased as their creators are biased. A good example are chatbots that turn out to be racist. But it goes much deeper than that. We need to make sure we infer the correct values on the products we create, and that we make them accessible to everyone, not just for people very similar to us. (Great talk by Tim Kadlec on this)
Blockchain technologies like Smart Contracts and Tokens allow us to add economic incentives to the ethical values expressed in our products. We can create networks and platforms where all users are economically invested in the ethos behind them. But as in the case above, it’s very important that those values are well thought out.
At a time when we’re going through critical philosophical questions raised by technology, extremist ideas are undoubtedly dangerous. We need to put our differences aside, they’re small and unimportant, and join efforts to develop all these amazing technologies based upon shared ethical values. Or we could all kill each other and prove the Fermi paradox solution, that there’s a barrier for intelligent civilizations. Your choice..
