Political activists, many of whom supported Bernie Sanders for President, have announced the forming of a new political party called a Movement For A People's Party due to disappointment with the Republican and Democratic party. In their platform they mention radical life extension and the threat of dystopian future due to technological progress being limited to a few wealthy individuals. They advocate for equitable distribution of technological progress in the public interest. https://peoplesparty.org/platform/.
Promise and Peril of Accelerating Technology
Modern technology is advancing exponentially and raising questions of tremendous consequence. What was once science fiction is becoming science fact. In the next few decades: Machine labor will replace human labor on a massive scale. Genetic engineering will allow us to create genetically-perfected children. Transportation will be driverless. Radical life extension technologies may give us the ability to end human aging. Blockchain will enable direct democracy. Interplanetary travel and mining will become possible. Computers will melt into our surroundings and become ubiquitous, as the internet of things matures. We will create fully-immersive virtual worlds that feel as real as our own. Neural interfaces will allow us to browse the internet and communicate with our minds. We will be able to digitally backup our consciousness and accelerate our mental processing. Machine intelligence will exceed human intelligence.
Wealthy people will gain access to these technologies first and exploit them in an effort to entrench their advantages. In order to avoid a dystopian future, it will grow increasingly important that technological progress be guided democratically, distributed equitably, and developed in the long-term public interest — rather than being guided by a few wealthy individuals for short-term private profit.
In the coming decades, the economies of scale that shaped the 20th century will give way to the distributed production of goods and energy on the household level with 3D printing. Additive manufacturing and open source design will make production much more resource-efficient and drive the marginal costs of creating each unit down to near-zero. Technology will dramatically increase our potential for global abundance, but the peril will skyrocket alongside the promise.
Nuclear weapons will be joined by a host of new existentially threatening technologies. With each passing year, bio weapons, nano weapons, artificial intelligence and other technologies with the power to wipe out humanity will grow more powerful and proliferate into more hands, just as nuclear weapons have. The risks they pose will compound.
Our economic and political systems will act as threat-multipliers. If we remain in a conflict-driven society characterized by soaring inequality, mass deprivation, and sectarian intolerance, the risk of a catastrophe will be extreme. We can only tempt fate for so long before she obliges our darkest impulse. Applying our potential to create an abundant and harmonious world is not just a moral imperative, it is now a matter of survival for our species.
For millions of years, humanity’s existence has been defined by scarcity, pitting people and nations against one another for limited resources. But today, we have the technology to easily satisfy every human need on the planet.
Our generation can achieve a stirring milestone that will be sung about for millennia to come. We can abolish the scarcity of human needs forever, ushering in an age of abundance for all. We can lift millions from suffering and survival to active contributors to science and the arts, allowing each person to reach his or her potential in a renaissance of creation and harmony.
Paradise or oblivion.
