What is the main message of Where Will Man Take Us??

Discover the potential and pitfalls of technology and how it will shape our future in Where Will Man Take Us? .

How long does it take to read Where Will Man Take Us??

The reading time for Where Will Man Take Us? varies but typically takes a few hours. The Blinkist summary can be read in around 15 minutes.

Is Where Will Man Take Us? a good book? Is it worth reading?

Where Will Man Take Us? is a thought-provoking book that offers insights into the future of technology and its impact on society. A must-read for those interested in the digital age.

Who is the author of Where Will Man Take Us??

Atul Jalan is the author of Where Will Man Take Us? .

Where Will Man Take Us? Summary of Key Ideas and Review

Name: Where Will Man Take Us?
Rating: 4.3 (57 reviews)
Author: Atul Jalan

Introduction

What’s in it for me? Discover just how far humanity and technology can take each other.

Humanity stands on the brink of a great breakthrough driven by our mastery of technology. After decades of hype, artificial intelligence is showing signs that it might be close to reaching human levels of intelligence. Nanotechnology is giving us greater control of our bodies, and genetic editing puts us on the verge of replacing natural selection with human selection. Quantum computing and big data analytics offer the tantalizing prospect of solving some of life’s most profound mysteries, from the existence of extraterrestrial life to the inner workings of the human brain.

Where Will Man Take Us? shows how technology is rapidly bringing us into a new epoch in human life. It explores some of the difficult societal, moral and economic questions posed by technology change and it considers whether our future as humans is likely to be immortality – or extinction.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how tiny robots will soon patrol your body and maintain your health;
why self-driving cars need to be taught ethics; and
how, within a century, our bodies may be transferable devices, and our minds uploaded to the cloud.

Key idea 1 of 8

Artificial intelligence is improving through learning, and machines are becoming more cognitive.

In 1997, Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer, beat the legendary chess player Gary Kasparov in a six-game series. It was a major step forward for artificial intelligence. But it was possible because chess is a relatively finite game, based on clear rules. Teach a machine the rules, and you can teach it to win.

So far, artificial intelligence has been good at performing individual tasks like playing chess. It can, as Apple’s Siri demonstrates, learn to understand your voice and follow commands; it can even translate one language into another.

But so far, it hasn’t learned to replicate wider human intelligence effectively. Things that come naturally to us, like intuition or creativity, remain difficult for machines. That’s starting to change, however, as the game Go shows us.

Go is a fantastically complicated two-player board game in which you try to surround more territory than your competitor. At any given time in a game of chess, there is an average of 35 possible moves available. In Go, there are 250. There are 361 squares on a Go grid, compared to 64 in chess, and an incredible 10170 potential board configurations. That’s too many to really comprehend, but for perspective, it’s far more than the number of atoms in our universe.

So when you play Go, you have to rely more on human intuition and feel than logical, rule-based decisions. It just isn’t possible to do all the calculations. That’s why when AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence created by Google’s DeepMind research unit, beat Lee Sedol, a top player of the game, it was clear that we’re on the cusp of major advances. But how did AlphaGo succeed?

Well, DeepMind gave it a collection of 30 million moves collected from human players and then trained it to play. The machine was then programmed for reinforcement learning, which mimics the way that our brains work. That meant that the artificial intelligence collected points when it did something that proved to be correct and lost them when it made mistakes. Then DeepMind trained AlphaGo against different versions of itself. Each time it played a game, it would learn by remembering which move brought it a reward, creating a cycle of improvement.

Observers of AlphaGo commented that its moves were inventive, with seasoned players even describing some as “divine.” Clearly, machines are becoming more human, developing intuition and creativity. Rather than being programmed, as with the rules of chess, they are teaching themselves to learn. And this shift is getting faster.

Key idea 2 of 8

Nanotechnology is truly tiny but will be the next big thing to change our lives.

Pluck a single hair from your head. It’s not very wide, is it? But in nano-terms, it’s huge. A single nanometer is about one ten-thousandth of its width. That’s the kind of scale we’re talking about when we talk about nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology is created at the scale of single atoms or molecules. But while it is truly small, its impact on our health and on our lives will be nothing short of transformative.

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Key idea 3 of 8

We now have the ability to play God with our genetic code.

At Cambridge University in 1962, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of the DNA molecule: A double helix structure of phosphates and sugars, held together by four different organic molecules. Built into this structure is a kind of code, one that spells out the biological blueprint of who we will become, from the color of our skin to our risk of hereditary disease.

In a sense, our DNA is our programming. And just as we can analyze the code in which computers are programmed, we can now read, analyze and manipulate our DNA.

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Key idea 4 of 8

All of us should have the right to own and monetize our complete personal data.

Our lives are increasingly being recorded by sensors, cameras and connected devices. Fragmented across cyberspace is a digital avatar of you. What you like to watch on TV, which shows you never finished. What you like to eat, what you buy, when and where. Your political views and who your friends are. But no one has the whole picture.

And that is part of the problem. Our data is not only our own, but worse, it lies in fragments with multiple different organizations around the world.

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Key idea 5 of 8

We are living through a new economic revolution which will challenge existing economic and social thinking.

Roughly 150 years ago, the Industrial Revolution swept the world, sparking major increases in wealth and productivity. But it also wrought huge social changes, as agricultural workers made the painful transition to factory work and city life.

Today, we are living through a new revolution, and whether you call it the digital revolution or the Artificial Intelligence Age, it’s likely to transform our lives totally.

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Key idea 6 of 8

Humanity needs to develop clear guidelines and ethics for artificial intelligence, but doing so will not be easy.

In March 2018, an autonomously driven Uber vehicle hit and killed a woman, making her the first pedestrian to be killed by a self-driving car. This immediately raised a difficult question: Who is to blame in this case? The owner, for owning the car and using it for its intended purpose? The manufacturer of the car? The company that built the software that controls it?

As “smart” machines become more and more a part of our daily lives, the question of how we regulate and control them becomes greater.

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Key idea 7 of 8

Technology may help us solve the mystery of whether we are alone in the universe.

There are around seven sextillion, or 1021, stars in the whole universe, each with their own planets, just like our sun. Do we really believe that intelligent life has evolved nowhere else but here?

It’s statistically likely that life exists elsewhere in the universe. But if that’s the case, why haven't we encountered it?

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Key idea 8 of 8

The singularity is coming: and it may leave us immortal – or extinct.

The futurist Ray Kurzweil takes more vitamins and minerals than your average 70-year-old, popping around 200 pills a day. Why? Because he believes that, by the middle of this century, humans will become immortal. And naturally, he’s determined to still be alive at the time.

Kurzweil isn’t some old crank but a recognized expert in artificial intelligence, the future and the singularity. That’s the point in the future when artificial intelligence becomes artificial super intelligence, when machines are learning so fast they far exceed human capabilities and generate repetitive self-improvement at an explosive, exponential pace. This time may be upon us soon – Kurzweil predicts the singularity will come in 2045.

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