Long term thinking has always been known as the mature and right act.
As we enter an unprecedented era thinking long term is more difficult, but more worthy than ever.
How would you live if you knew that you could be alive for 100,000 years?
The fact of the matter is, if technological progression happens at the supposed rate, then you will be living this reality.
I personally think its important to be self aware of our current fallibility to be linear thinkers, and recognize that the uncomfortable aspect of thinking long and hard about the future is worth its weight in gold. Culture has not even come close to keeping that frame of mind in view, and actually has this appeal to stay within an Overton window of what everyone else is thinking.
The biggest thing that comes from me keeping a cosmic frame of mind, is a willingness to truly devote myself to the greatest mission I can possibly imagine. Especially given the ratio of expected time that my human input is viable, relevant to the length of potential time I’ll be an experiencer of this magical future.
Based on this purely analytical report, a decade is much beyond the expected amount of time for our human intellect to reign supreme on this planet.
Now before we get into the technical implications of that, and a bit of the actual game plan, I feel compelled to bring out a very quick but powerful lesson for those who are not even happy by the idea of living that next decade. A sense of wonder, awe or just better clarity over a lack of will can be inspired for the ones who do have great dreams, but need extra firepower in their tank.
The Next Era: Leveraging To Infinity
We are entering an era characterized by unprecedented leverage, magnified by the capabilities of general pre-trained transformers (GPT). While many companies are capitalizing on short-term opportunities, seasoned business veterans, who experienced the internet boom, are strategizing differently. They are in search of sustainable competitive advantages or "moats" in this evolving landscape.
Lets first look at the pattern that underlies this congregation of power, where that most deeply hurts the world, and then on where the opening is to grab power towards a positive global narrative.
Every single industrial revolution leads to centralization of power. For example the 1st industrial revolution saw small textile shops going out of business with ones utilizing steam power winning in the market. The 2nd industrial revolution led to small farmers going out of business. The 3rd industrial revolution killed the companies operating printing presses and as their business got eaten by the digital world. The good news? Efficiency of these companies drives economic growth raising the global GDP.
The first Industrial Revolution went from 1760–1840, and was defined by steam power and textile industry. Life in 1840 was not much different from life in 1760. Outside the general background technological progress being known, your daily life and the general human condition had not meaningfully changed since the days of Ancient Greece other than the increased number of machines and better nutrition. This industrial revolution largely benefited only the capitalist owners, undermining the aristocracy and causing a drop off in the quality of life for the working class.
The second Industrial Revolution went from 1870-1914 and is defined by the maturation of electricity, electric light, advanced steam power, nuclear physics, early quantum physics, the telephone, automobiles, the birth of modern medicine, modern agriculture, advanced mechanics, radio, and so much more that it boggles the mind. For the first time, technological change had a direct effect on the human condition, changing the quality of life for even the poor. The Industrialization of life itself wrought great optimism, but it also directly led to the bloodshed of the first World War.
Third Industrial Revolution: 1945-1995 Defined by nuclear power and advanced energy production, digital computing, the birth of the internet, genetic modification, jet flight, space flight, early robotics, television, mass media, mass electrification, home automation, personal computers, and much more. The human condition changed at a rate so extreme that the future was no longer easily predictable based on past performance. In fact, even the poorest could now live better than kings of olde.
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The Fourth Industrial Revolution: TODAY
Advanced artificial narrow intelligence is what we see taking over the majority of newly funded VC companies today, but the largest investments such as in Imbue and Adept are in general intelligence. In this final stage of the congregation of commercial power, the creation of general intelligence marks a tipping point in interfacing with the world.
Artificial general intelligence will be the steam and electricity of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, allowing for a lot of what we're soon to be capable of. Indeed, my honest opinion is that without digital computing and narrow artificial intelligence, we as a technological civilization would have stagnated around 1970 much the same way we could have stagnated in the 1800s without steam power. On its own, AGI almost certainly means the Singularity, a revolution so far beyond anything we've ever seen in the history of life on this planet that it'd essentially begin a new epoch of the universe itself.
****Once we have even proto-AGI, let alone the full thing, we'll be living in neo-Antiquity. Robots are the final true stepping stone to a "sci-fi world," because once we have robots, we will have The Future™. Robots mean industry wherever. Robots mean abundance. The lines between capitalism and the idealized version of socialism will blur with the introduction of a technological helot class, and in more entertaining fashion, robots mean almost any fictional creation can be realized in our real world. Barring thermodynamics, robots resolve many of the crises of labor such as the need to eat and rest or the inefficiencies of human labor.
If its hard to imagine that “robots mean almost any fictional creation can be realized in our real world.” line then read Thought To Reality Difficulty Is Approaching 0
The good news is that global GDP will continue to exponentially accelerate leading towards post-scarcity.
The bad news is that leverage and power continues to move towards the hands of the few. Each new revolution has massively increased the speed of our global organism with the internet most recently rapidly taking human thought online and setting the foundation for the revolution we are entering. The chart below is representative, of this effect of coagulation of power. Each revolution and cycle is happening faster, and decreases the options in the market that people care about.
There used to be tons of local newspapers, then national ones, now a few social media platforms dominate control of most information sharing of our global organism. Each cycle sees many new companies form at the beginning hoping to grab a piece of new market share, and then towards a few companies who dominate the space. Take online commerce and server hosting for example, both dominated with over 50% of the entire market by Amazon.
Notice the log scale on the Y-axis of this chart, leading down to only a handful of companies at the end of this next revolution, who truly have access to shaping the course of humanities future.
Looking at this future can be scary. Its hard to imagine how these technologies advancing will allow unworldly leverage changing all aspects of our daily lives. Looking at this era where artificial intelligence surpasses the capability of man, is one that brings up deep questions about what it means to be human and how we should control our shared dream. The future is happening through us after all, we are all a part of this story, and all play a role in how it unfolds.
(Want to play a big role in it and have a message to spread? I wrote one such blueprint for the storyteller, which Ill link here. I actually plan to use this blueprint myself, but am lining up all the pieces to do it right, in the meantime if someone else can shift the world, be my guest. I play the game of enlightened capitalism, feeding a positive end state for the world as much as possible with a recognition that the only eternal currency is good karma.)
Overall more leverage for the world has normally meant the uplifting in humanity in general. We have 8x’ed our global GDP in the past 100 years, which should mean far better lives for everyone.
While we do have better lives in some areas, unequal gains and an unenlightened culture have caused other aspects to decline. You’ll see this graph took a major turn for the worse in 1971. This website WTFHappenedIn1971.com details many more stats which took a turn for the worse.
