Year: 2018

When you dig into the numbers it’s clear that a sizeable fraction of domestic job lost has been lost to automation. Four major research groups are projecting unemployment rates beyond those of the Great Depression within the next decade or two, and the pace of change is on an exponential acceleration curve.

While no doubt these changes will prove momentous, there are effective policies, projects, and technologies–some available even today and some close at hand–that can get us out of this crisis and into a much brighter future for all. We at the Society of Humane Future Visionaries propose a program for creating parts of that better future right now, starting with a movement embodying the humanitarian values that will incrementally get us there. We intend to deploy the wildly successful Silicon Valley industry disruption process as applied to society itself. In the short term, we are advocating more effective distributed democratic processes and a surprisingly feasible Market-Oriented Universal Basic Income implemented within local and world-wide communities of mutual support. Our longer-term goal is to build the first of many physical cities or city-states that fully embrace these evolving values, policies, and technologies to serve as living proof to the world that they work.

 Steve’s talk on “Ethical Systems and Artificial Superintelligence” will be a broad overview of Nick Bostrom’s book “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies” and how normative ethics relates to Superintelligence”. It will ask questions like: what might be the goals of an artificial intelligence that can significantly out-think its human creators? Which systems of ethics might be most stable as we build and teach artificial intelligences? How viable are Asimov’s 3 laws?