In the past four decades technology has fundamentally altered our lives: from the way we work to how we communicate to how we fight wars. These technologies have not been without controversy, and many have sparked intense debates that are often polarized or embroiled in scientific ambiguities or dishonest demagoguery.
The debate on stem cells and embryo research, for example, has become a hot-button political issue involving scientists, policy makers, politicians and religious groups. Similarly, the discussions on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have mobilized civil society, scientists and policy makers in a wide debate on ethics and safety. The developments in genome-editing technologies are just one example that bioresearch and its impact on market goods are strongly dependent on social acceptance and cannot escape public debates of regulation and ethics. Moreover, requests for transparency are increasingly central to these debates, as shown by movements like Right to Know, which has repeatedly demanded the labeling of GMOs on food products.
Ethical and regulatory challenges
On March 4 the World Economic Forum released its list of the top 10 emerging technologies for 2015. It includes advances that aim to resolve some of the ethical debates posed by an earlier generation of technologies as well as others that will bring about new ethical and regulatory challenges. The notion of “emerging” technology does not necessarily mean that all such advances are new or revolutionary by themselves. Some have already been around for years or, in various forms, for decades (for example, fuel-cell vehicles, artificial intelligence, the digital genome, additive manufacturing methods). They are now transitioning to a new phase, however, becoming more widely used or incorporated in consumer goods. In one way or another all these technologies are bound to gain more ground in coming years.
Precise genetic-engineering techniques will likely solve some of the main controversial elements in the GMO debate—for example, the fact that genetic engineering was neither precise nor predictable. The range of procedures associated with GM crops is precise in the initial process of cutting and splitting genes in the test tubes. But the subsequent steps are uncontrolled and some mutations can occur and alter the functioning of the natural genes in potentially harmful ways. A technique that would achieve greater accuracy and greater predictability over genetic mutations is, of course, a net improvement on conventional GMOs. It is, however, critical that this technique is properly studied and implemented in a sustainable way and that it doesn’t just give renewed legitimacy to genetic engineering in agriculture.
More accuracy is also expected in the operation of drones with the adaptation of the sense-and-avoid equipment. This will have unequivocal security benefits, helping unmanned aerial vehicles avoid collisions with other drones or piloted aircraft. The critical offshoot of this innovation is that it will encourage and enable the operation of a larger number of drones, a development which can be both welcomed (for instance, China flies drones to help fight pollution) and anticipated, as the growth in dangerous drone flights around populated areas appears to be developing ahead of regulations.
Autonomous systems, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, while already decades-old technologies, will continue to expand their functionalities and enter new eras of continual specialization. More intuitive, emergent AI could change speech and conversational software with unprecedented precision, helping millions of people and also redefining the way we command and interact with computers.
Robots as intelligent as humans
New-generation robotics will increasingly have more autonomy and capacity to react without preprogramming, which complicates current debates on robotics: The trust and reliance invested in a robot will have to be greater, bringing robots closer to the point of being on par with us. Neuromorphic chip technology further illustrates this. It is among the most revolutionary developments in AI and a radical step in computing power. Mimicking the intricacies of the human brain, a neuro-inspired computer would work in a fashion similar to the way neurons and synapses communicate. It could potentially learn or develop memory. This would imply that, for instance, a drone equipped with a neuromorphic chip would be better at surveillance, remembering or recognizing new elements in its environment.
Immediate ethical red flags emerge, however: Building neuromorphic chips would create machines as smart as humans, the most intelligent species on the planet. These technologies are demonstrations of human excellence yet computers that think could be devastating for our species and, as Marvin Minsky has put it, they could even keep humanity as pets.
The interest in smart machines is now also pursued in additive manufacturing methods, which are increasingly integrating smart materials into manufacturing. These materials could adapt, change properties, interact or respond to their environments. With 4-D Printing, which takes into account the transformation that occurs over time, some materials will adapt and repair by themselves without maintenance or they could be preprogrammed to disintegrate on their own. This will raise new questions of standardization, traceability and copyright.
More radical disruptions will occur once the technology transitions to the organic world, making it possible to assemble biomaterials that evolve and develop on their own, design cancer-fighting robots that would release antibodies only in contact with cancerous cells, and so on. The moment of the print button for biology is nearing. Effectively, this could also mean that in a not too-distant future smart pharmacology will permit us to receive a continuous supply of antidepressants or neuroenhancers every time our dopamine level drops. The ethical consequences of such developments should be thought through. Having our emotions controlled in detail by smart machines will pave the way for dangerous forms of dependences and new understandings of our humanity and the emotions that define us.
Genome-based treatment, based on wider and cheaper availability of genome data, will provide new ways to customize the therapeutic protocol and enhance our control over diseases and medical treatment. The speed, accuracy and costs of genome-reading have changed dramatically in just a matter of years: A decade ago this process was a billion-dollar effort whereas today the price has dropped sharply to around $8,000. In cancer treatment, for instance, this will allow transitioning from broad-spectrum chemotherapies to more individualized diagnoses and targeting of specific malfunctioning genes. As we are truly starting to gain more precise tools to fight life-threatening diseases, a range of other issues arise. Pervasive global inequalities will still prevent millions of people from enjoying the benefits of such treatments, even in a context of decreasing costs of genome sequencing. Furthermore, a range of security and privacy risks associated with data storage of genome data will invariably arise and require protective mechanisms, especially as such databases are often shared for security reasons (for example, between international police forces), increasing the possibility of hacking or abuse by authorities.
Inevitably, the emerging technologies of the future will redefine our understanding of biology, the material world and manufacturing. The implications will further extend into geopolitics and global balances of power. Fuel-cell vehicles are finally expected to make their way to the market and reduce dependency on oil or emissions that contribute to climate change. In the long term, this will accentuate the vulnerability of oil-dependent economies and recalibrate geopolitical relations. Recyclable thermostat polymers, reportedly discovered by accident, will dramatically change fabrication and manufacturing, leading to new standards in industries. Globally, the advent of distributed manufacturing is bound to lead to a reassessment of the meaning of value chains and infrastructure. Rather than ship parts of a given product, some companies will simply trade information, leaving it to the customer to finalize the product’s manufacture. A suite of other technologies such as 3-D printing, informatics and robotics are enabling a paradigm shift to a dematerialized future with endless possibilities for customization.
Changes ahead
As always, we must welcome innovation and the benefits it brings us. But we must also remain committed to sustainable development, taking into account issues of inequality, human dignity and inclusiveness. Finally, this year’s top emerging technologies also remind us of the importance of political commitment. Take the example of the transition toward fuel-cell vehicles: it will require huge infrastructural adaptations and conversions. In fact, it’s estimated that if the U.S. spent the same amount of money it took to put a person on the moon ($100 billion in today’s dollars), the shift to hydrogen-powered cars and refueling stations that pump hydrogen would be significantly eased. Often the technology itself is available but only a massive exercise of political will can bring about change.
Some technologies might progress independently of political support. But good governance, examinations of dual-use risks and ethical considerations must still remain guiding posts at all times. Ultimately, how we approach the regulation of emerging technologies will inevitably have wide implications—not only for security and ethics but for our definition of human dignity and the equality of individuals.
New Yorker 18 May 2015
On the first weekend of January, many of the leading researchers in artificial intelligence traveled to Puerto Rico to take part in an unusual private conference. Part of what made it unusual was its topic: whether the rise of intelligent machines would be good or bad for people, something endlessly discussed by the public but rarely by the scientists themselves. But the conference’s organizers were interesting, too. The meeting had been arranged by something called the Future of Life Institute, a young think tank run by a cosmologist at MIT named Max Tegmark, who had become a little bit famous when he’d published a book hypothesizing that the universe might merely be the articulation of a mathematical structure; it was underwritten mainly by Jaan Tallinn, the co-founder of Skype. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, flew in to give a Sunday-evening talk.
The researchers in the audience found themselves presented with two propositions. The first was that they were the stewards of an exceptional breakthrough. “We’re in the midst of one of the greatest onetime events in history,” declared the MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson. Attendees were asked to predict when machines would become better than humans at all human tasks; virtually all were willing to put a date on the event, and their median answer was 2050. The second proposition was more complicated, because it asked the researchers to consider that this breakthrough might be a very bad thing. Famed technologists have been warning about the threats that AI might pose: not just Musk and Tallinn but Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking, who recently said that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Or as Musk has said, “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.”
Tegmark’s conference was designed to sketch that demon so that the researchers might begin to see the worries as more serious than science fiction. Brynjolfsson and other economists explained the risk that economic inequality might escalate as machines grow more adept at more tasks, rendering some jobs obsolete and enriching those who designed and capitalized the machines. Academic and industry researchers detailed exactly how expansive the machine brain had been growing, now able to comprehend and generate concepts that could plausibly be described as “beliefs.” Law professors explained the challenges of assigning legal responsibility to computers that identify a target for bombing or suggest driving directions.
The Sunday-evening session, titled the Intelligence Explosion, described the possibility, theorized by the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, that machines might, very rapidly, come to far exceed human capacities. Tallinn recalled how the AI company DeepMind, in which he was an early investor, had instructed its algorithm to play Atari’s Breakout, in which the player has to knock out bricks with a bouncing ball, and try to maximize its score. The program had no concept of a ball or a paddle, was given no explanation of how to win points. But within two hours, it was playing capably, and within four hours, it had figured out how to win, using the ball to create a tunnel through the bricks so that it could knock out the formation from behind. Tallinn thought that this could be a glimpse of the future, both mesmerizing and terrifying. For those who were worried about AI, each time the machines got smarter, it raised once again the question of control.
One good rule of thumb for life in capitalism is that if billionaires start to be alarmed about the ethical implications of the work you are doing, then you are doing something significant. Musk would soon pledge $10 million to the Institute to fund artificial-intelligence research, and more than a thousand leading AI practitioners, including all who were at the conference, would sign a statement, designed by Tegmark, vowing to ensure that intelligent machines are socially beneficial. “AI is beginning to work at a level where it is coming out of the lab and into society,” Tegmark said when I asked him why these topics were suddenly so urgent. Robots are already very capable at sensing the world around them and performing physical tasks within it: The driverless car is a reality, and a fully autonomous kitchen (where a robot can prepare a dish by itself) is planned for 2017. There have also been advancements in making robots social — machines are now able to interpret what they see at a “near human” level and are being taught to comprehend the emotions behind human facial expressions in order to model our experience. To some of the workaday AI practitioners in the audience in Puerto Rico, who struggle daily with the shortcomings of the machines and tend to see progress as incremental rather than explosive, the alarms onstage could seem a little florid. “The algorithms don’t work that way,” an Oregon State professor named Tom Dietterich, the president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, murmured after taking in Bostrom’s ideas. “People ask what is the relationship between humans and machines,” Dietterich told me later, “and my answer is that it’s very obvious: Machines are our slaves.” But Dietterich signed Tegmark’s letter, too, and the AAAI’s annual conference, held a few weeks later, focused on lengthy discussions of robot ethics.
Making The World A Better Place, Rapidly
Why are people so down on technological progress? Pope Francis complains in his new encyclical about “a blind confidence in technical solutions”, of “irrational confidence in progress” and the drawbacks of the “technocratic paradigm”. He is reflecting a popular view, held across the political spectrum, from the Unabomber to Russell Brand, that technology, consumerism and progress have been bad for people, by making them more selfish and unhappy.
But however thoroughly you search the papal encyclical (a document that does at least pay heed to science, and to evolutionary biology in particular), you will find no data to support the claim that as people have got richer they have got nastier and more miserable. That is because the data points the other way. The past five decades have seen people becoming on average wealthier, healthier, happier, better fed, cleverer, kinder, more peaceful and more equal.
Compared with 50 years ago, people now live 30 per cent longer; have 30 per cent more food to eat; spend longer in school; have better housing; bury 70 per cent fewer of their children; travel more; give more to charity as a proportion of income; are less likely to be murdered, raped or robbed; are much less likely to die in war; are less likely to die in a drought, flood or storm.
The data show a correlation between wealth and happiness both within and between countries and within lifetimes. Global inequality has been plummeting for years as people in poor countries get rich faster than people in rich countries. The vast preponderance of these improvements has come about as a result of innovation in technology and society.
So what precisely is the problem with technology that the Pope is complaining about? He cannot really think that life’s got worse for most people. He cannot surely believe that the dreadful suffering that still exists is caused by too much technology rather than too little, because surely he can see most of the suffering is in the countries with least technology, least energy, least economic growth, and most focus on ideology and superstition. Do Syria, North Korea, Congo and Venezuela have too much consumerism? “Obsession with a consumerist lifestyle . . . can only lead to violence and mutual destruction,” says the encyclical. Really? Only? If you hear of an atrocity in a shopping mall, do you immediately think of consumerism or religious fanaticism as the more likely cause? There is no mention in the encyclical of the suffering caused by fanaticism, totalitarianism or lack of technological progress — of the four million who die of indoor smoke from cooking over wood fires, for example.
Yet the Pope is exercised about the dangers of genetically modified food, for although he admits, “no conclusive proof exists that GM cereals may be harmful to human beings”, he thinks “difficulties should not be underestimated”. This in a world where golden rice, a genetically modified cereal fortified with vitamin A, could be preventing millions of deaths and disabilities every year, but has been prevented from doing so entirely by fierce opposition from the environmentalists the Pope has now allied himself so closely with.
The Pope has latched on to the wrong end of the environmental movement, the reactionary and outdated faction that still thinks like the Club of Rome, a group of grandees who started meeting in the 1960s to express their woes about the future in apocalyptic terms and blaming technology rather than lack of it.
Having been comprehensively discredited by history (their prediction was that by now we would be mired in ecological horror), they are still dispensing misanthropic gloom.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber was the only scientist at the launch of the papal encyclical. He is a member of the Club of Rome.
Technological progress is what enables us to prevent child mortality; to use less land to feed the world, and so begin reforesting large parts of the rich world; to substitute oil for whale blubber and so let whales increase again; to get fossil-fuelled electricity to people so they don’t die of pollution after cooking over fires of wood taken from the rainforest.
“Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way,” says the Pope. Personally, I would rather speed up the stunning and unprecedented decline in poverty of recent decades.
The New Economy
Until recently if there was a stranger sleeping in your bed, another driving your car and someone else loitering outside your front door you would have called the police. Now, it probably means that you’ve joined the “sharing economy” — you rent out your home on Airbnb, make some extra money through EasyCar Club and have paid someone to wait for a delivery using TaskRabbit.
These companies are all part of a new industry based on using technology to share assets, resources and skills, and it is challenging traditional business models across the board. So who are the big players, what are the investment implications — and how can you get involved?
This new model, also called the “on-demand economy”, is one of the most significant legacies of the technology revolution spawned by the internet, and the pace of its growth is staggering. PwC, the accountancy firm, estimates that revenues for the five most prominent sharing economy sectors — peer-to-peer (P2P) finance, staffing, P2P accommodation, car sharing and music and video streaming — could rise to £9 billion in the UK by 2025, up from £0.5 billion today. Global revenues, which have now reached $15 billion (£9.6 billion), could hit $335 billion in ten years.
John Hawksworth, chief economist at PwC, says: “Digital communications allow sharing to happen across a global village of consumers and providers, with trust established through electronic peer reviews. Looking beyond the sectors where sharing is well established, there are some very exciting growth opportunities that are yet to be fully realised. We think this model could spread.”
Finance
The lending drought that followed the global crisis opened the door for a nascent breed of businesses that have stepped in to fill the void. These allow lenders and borrowers to bypass the banks and borrow or lend directly at superior rates. Now, websites such as Zopa, Funding Circle and Ratesetter are moving into the mainstream, with the latter having lent more than half a billion pounds since its launch in 2010. In January this year alone it lent more than £43 million. Recent developments, such as FCA regulation and the inclusion of P2P in the tax-free Isa savings envelope from April next year, will expand the reach of such companies. More disruption across the sector is expected, from share dealing to currency exchanges, with companies such as WeSwap offering the ability for people to swap their travel money with those travelling in the opposite direction.
Staffing
What to do if the agenda for your day includes walking the dogs, waiting at home for a new washing machine to be delivered and queueing up for the latest iPhone? The sharing economy is here to help, and you can book people to do all of these things on Taskrabbit, an odd-jobs marketplace where people looking for extra income list themselves and will do almost anything, as long it’s legal.
Accommodation The market leader is Airbnb, which was founded in 2008 and is used by an average of 425,000 people every night worldwide and is valued at £12.8 billion, despite not owning the physical properties in which its users stay. Other startups in the sector are introducing different innovations. Sites for home exchange, where instead of paying to use someone’s property you let them use yours, are a particular area of growth. One of the world’s largest is Love Home Swap, which enables holidaymakers to exchange homes in more than 160 countries (“You stay at mine, I stay at yours”). A British success story, it was founded by Debbie Wosskow, who is set to join the Lords under the Tories after carrying out a review into the sharing industry for the government.
Transport
Most people have cars that sit idle for the majority of the time and are very expensive to keep. Now motorists can put this downtime to use and make a profit from their vehicle by renting it to other drivers. EasyCar Club, which is part of the easyGroup franchise, says that people using the site make an average of £1,800 a year. There are no membership charges, and the site takes a 10 per cent cut of income. Manufacturers are also entering the car-sharing market, which is a serious threat to their business — some estimates suggest that 5 per cent growth in sharing could halve sales of cars in the United States in the next decade.
In London, Ford’s Go!Drive is competing with BMW’s DriveNow. Users of Go!Drive pick up and return cars at hubs and pay 17p per minute at all times, while with DriveNow, which charges a joining fee of £29, then 39p a minute when driving and 19p a minute when parked, you can drop the car off wherever you want. Access to the vehicles is via a phone app or card, and insurance, tax and parking are all included. Other car share companies, such as Zipcar, owned by Avis Budget, the car rental group, charge an annual fee and vehicles are picked up and dropped off in the same location. Alternative options include Liftshare and BlaBlaCar, which match drivers with passengers going in the same direction, allowing them to split fuel costs. If you prefer two wheels, spinlister.com allows you to rent a bicycle from a local.
How to invest
Businesses at the forefront of this movement are start-ups that use crowdsourcing sites for funding, where you can invest in return for equity and get tax breaks. Sites include Seedrs, Crowdfunder and Crowdcube, which has raised £78 million for 229 businesses in the past four years. One is Compare and Share, a sharing economy comparison site that raised £275,000. Earlier this year JustPark, a P2P parking business, raised £3.7 million.
There are also investment trusts that fund P2P lenders. P2P Global Investments, launched last year, has raised £400 million from its latest share issue. Backed by Neil Woodford, it is now among the 30 biggest London-listed investment trusts. The yield is 2.5 per cent and the trust is trading at an 8.6 per cent premium.
Simon Moore, of Tilney BestInvest, says: “Its substantial diversification — 180,000 individual loans spread across 15 platforms — means that risk should be lower when compared to investors attempting to select individual peer-topeer loans themselves.”
Other options include Ranger Direct Lending and VPC Specialty Lending. These trusts yield 9.5 per cent and 7.3 per cent respectively.