Automation will one day Replace Humans in Government, experts say

The social networks are the government of the future - the kind of automation you speak of in government, will be for fact finding - like a WikiPedia of law.

The actual decisions will be made by the collective power of the social network/global village.

Although this may seem a bit scary to many, according to Ray Kurzweil and other forward-thinkers, by the time our machines exponentially advance to, say, the 2050s, we will develop complete faith in automated systems; and governing decisions will prove more fair coming from machines than from emotional beings.

This could become a very natural part of our amazing ‘global village’ civilization as we head for the twenty-second century and beyond.

Machines may serve us, but we will always be in charge of our welfare.

Industrialization will reach most developing nations by 2030, and the next generation of quantum/optical computing should emerge, as well as advanced healthcare using genetic engineering and medical nanotech..

Although technological powers will be vast, they will not be a panacea for society’s ongoing problems. Intercultural conflict, WMDs, and threats of environmental collapse are likely to force the move to some form of global community as the best means for managing such issues.

Civilization has withstood all kinds of monstrous problems in our past and we will probably survive globalization too.

As we become more of a ‘global village’ we will experience the need for fair ‘global governing’ decisions that cannot be interfered with by human emotions.

A unified planet will move into the future much more smoothly if it can eliminate nations being unfair to each other. Incredibly fast quantum supercomputers of the future can provide equitable governing to make this future happen.

Experts everywhere agree the next stage of our evolution will focus on a global community inspired by higher levels of consciousness. This is the next logical step for that future.

Dick, your perspective is too narrow to see the future properly.

Try to digest this:

http://www.artistserver.com/member/blog.cfm/a/9587/blog/2773
Post-Transhumanism and the Cybernetic Dreamtime Singularity of the 2030s

http://accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis.html
The Transcension Hypothesis:
Sufficiently Advanced Civilizations May Invariably Leave Our Universe

“The next phase of tomorrow’s intelligent machines could include ‘automatons’ that always make fair and just decisions.”

This assumes that we have figured out what are fairness or justice.  That is a philosophical question that has never been resolved. 

What a computer will advance in terms of justice, and what I believe you are getting at, is impartiality.  A computer will not, on its own account, act on a personal agenda (I think).

“Future artificial intelligence systems, according to most experts, will make decisions on their own, but human values will always be ingrained into their creation.”

But these human values are not necessarily just.  I mean, these computers could be programmed by a Nazi regime!

The only thing that computers might have to contribute to fairness is impartiality, but if it’s programmed to impartially enforce the unfair opinions of its programmers, that will not necessarily be an advance in justness.

Nevertheless, I agree that computers will probably takeover most government functions, I just disagree that it will necessarily be an advance in justness.

Remember, we are speaking of mid-century humans. By 2050, humanity will have experienced what some forward-thinkers describe as “The Singularity” when machines surpass human level intelligence and abilities to transfer minds becomes commonplace.

Between mid-2030s and 2050, some futurists predict we will begin replacing biological parts with more powerful non-biological parts – including our neurons – enabling us to move our machine intelligence into our bodies. In effect, we will become the machine (although this writer believes we will always consider ourselves human).

Given this situation, I believe governing would not be an activity that we would want to waste our thoughts on. Our minds would find more challenging opportunities in terraforming Earth, learning to harness more of our planet and solar energy and develop means to control the weather.

Then we could embark on a Star Trek-like goal of scattering our populations to the stars. Colonize moon, Mars, a few artificial habitats; then it’s off to where no man has gone before.

This dreamy future could become reality. All it may take is determination and a positive attitude.

As we move into the late 2020s and 2030s, the most salient scenario is that we will merge with our technology gradually, not overnight. We may not experience a single great leap like a “Singularity”; instead, we could see many small steps as we slowly become more machine-like.

AI/robots will eventually surpass human levels of intelligence and develop ability to self-replicate, increasing intelligence with each succeeding generation. This will produce an information explosion almost beyond imagination.

However, our bodies will evolve during this same time. We will use nanobots to kill pathogens and cancer cells, and then go into our brain and do benign things like augment memory. Slowly these nanobots will become more sophisticated.

We will direct our smart ‘bots to convert biological neurons into powerful non-biological ones, and rewrite our brain’s “software”. This will allow us to connect with machines and share their super-intelligence.

Eventually, every cell in our body will become non-biological, and our silicon-based mind will be able to interface with each other and with our silicon ‘cousins’. As robots develop new abilities and become stronger, we will share those new strengths and become equally strong. As we become more machine-like and robots become more human-like, the difference between human and machine will blur. By the end of this century, robots could all but disappear.

The journey into this future will take place one benign, safe change at a time, beginning in early 2030s and ending in the last half of this century.

@ Dick Pelletier

“Between mid-2030s and 2050, some futurists predict we will begin replacing biological parts with more powerful non-biological parts”

Funny that you mention that because if you are thinking about prosthetic body parts, I recently read from an article in the May, 2012 issue of Popular Mechanics titled “Re-engineering the Human” the the major companies that make those parts have a completely different prediction of the future.  Here’s a segment from the article.

“Eventually, Oddsson says, prosthetics research will disappear, replaced by advanced reconstructive technology.  By 2050, he ballparks, limbs will be recreated - printed, grown, who knows? - and all of the arcane, bio-mechanical secrets collected by companies like Ossur will be harnessed to restore flesh and bone.  It’s a strange best-case scenario; that an industry will innovate itself out of existence…”

  I envision a different future unfolding.

  Futurists Ray Kurzweil and Institute for Molecular Manufacturing’s Robert Freitas believe that tiny medical nano-devices expected by late 2020s will provide radical upgrades to our bodies. “We won’t reengineer our bodies all at once”, Kurzweil says, “It will be an incremental process accomplished one benign step at a time over decades”.

    Today we prevent many diseases through nutrition and supplements, and we look forward to biotech and nanotech breakthroughs expected in the 2010s and 2020s that will replace defective and aging organs with stem cell therapies, genetic engineering, and advanced nanomaterials.

    Kurzweil also predicts that in the coming decades, progress in cognitive sciences will enable non-biological intelligence to merge with our biological brains.

    As we learn more about our body, experts say we can engineer new systems with dramatic improvements. Freitas believes that by the 2030s, we could create artificial respirocytes that would allow us to hold our breath for 4 hours and sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath.

    Even more radical, with respirocytes providing extended access to oxygen, nanobots could remove carbon dioxide from our cells, which would eliminate the need for lungs. Without lungs, we would no longer require breathable air! This will give us incredible abilities. We could live in space and on other planets with little technology help.

    In his book, Fantastic Voyage, Kurzweil describes how we could reengineer our digestive system, enabling nanobots to deliver nutrients directly into our cells, eliminating the need for food. To implement this technology, we would wear a ‘nutrient belt’ loaded with millions of nutrient-bearing ‘bots, which would enter and leave the body through our skin.

    However, many may want to hang on to their food-eating pleasures, so scientists propose a special digestive tract to receive real food, but bar those nutrients from entering the blood stream. ‘Bots would convert this food into molecules and route it into the ‘nutrient belt’. This would allow us to eat anything we want – no harm, no foul.

    The next organ on our hit list is the heart, a remarkable machine, but one that is too often subject to failure. Freitas has designed a revolutionary nano-robotic blood cell system that he believes could eliminate the need for a heart.

    This configuration would also eliminate need for kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, intestines, bowel, and skeleton. We will need to keep our skin, sex organs, mouth and upper esophagus for touching, talking and eating, but scientists believe we could also replace these parts with an exotic ‘nano-skin’, which offers greater protection from physical force and extreme temperatures, and may even provide more enjoyable sex and touch.

    The most amazing application of this future includes replacing the brain. IBM hopes to reverse-engineer the brain by 2030, and with efforts to capture thought at moment of creation underway at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, forward-thinkers believe we can one day replace neurons with materials that process information at supercomputer speeds.

    Will this ‘magical future’ happen? Forward-thinkers see these radical advances as our next evolutionary step, which could become reality by 2050.

The vast majority of government functions do not require an AGI. If you break down all of the tasks completed by each government agency; federal, state and local, you find that most of those functions only require modest decision making that could be done by a Semi-Intelligent Agents. Many other functions such as maintaining our infrastructure will be handled by maintenance bots. Only in a few special areas, such as judiciary, and law making will the human brain prove useful 20 years from now. Even that usefulness will evaporate by 2050.

@Kelly Balthrop

Excellent observation. You are 100% correct.

The show must go on:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/brazil_facebook_flash_mob.php

In the past 24 hours, more than forty thousand people have signed up on Facebook to attend a flash mob barbecue this weekend in Higienopolis, a wealthy neighborhood in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The Sao Paulo state government conceded yesterday to demands from the Neighborhood Association to block construction of a subway station. The neighbors objected that the subway would lead to “different people” congregating in the area.

_____

Evidence^^^