Transcript
Page 1: Dan Sarewitz: Everything You Know About the Future is Wrong

Everything You Know About the Future is Wrong

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Perfectly Obvious in Retrospect

Page 3: Dan Sarewitz: Everything You Know About the Future is Wrong

Converging Technologies for human enhancement “could achieve a golden age that would be a turning point for human productivity and quality of life. . . . The Twenty-first century could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment.”

Mihail C. Roco and William Sims Bainbridge. “Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance.” NSF June 2002.

With Perfectly Obvious Implications

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Newcomen and Calley steam engine, 1712

Guess its Future! Win Valuable Prizes!

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Guess its Future! Win Valuable Prizes!

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Can You Find the Hidden Exponential Innovation Curve?*

*Hint: check out the losers

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This is dangerous new territory for warfare, yet there are no new ethical codes or guidelines in place. I have worked in artificial intelligence for decades, and the idea of a robot making decisions about human termination is terrifying. --Noel Sharkey, Univ. Sheffield, UK, 2008

Things Ain’t What They Used to Be

War is now dropping bombs from aeroplanes and killing women and children in their beds; it is shooting by telephonic orders, at an unseen place miles away and slaughtering invisible men. US Clergyman Harry Emerson Fosdick, 1917

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Who Knew?

That this:

And this:

Came from this?:

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coming soon to your neighborhood: radical social transformation

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The Past is a Line

The future is an almost infinite set of possibilities—each with an unknown probability.

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