I saw a news article today that the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, welcomes California’s wealth tax and said it would be a privilege to pay his fair share. That is refreshing. I saw a couple videos of Elon Musk recently. In one he is laughing like a super villain about using all of a town’s water and in another he is talking about the future and the future he describes is romantic and utopic. It is hard to think of this as the same person.
Teddy Roosevelt believed in what he called good trusts. Mega businesses that actually had the public interest in mind. There are people out their like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Mark Cuban who do seem to have some soul while holding vast stores of money. Then there are others that view wealth, not as stewardship, but as power and wish to use it to dominate the planet.
AI is a technology that can be used for the common good of mankind or to destroy us entirely. It is truly transcendental technology. It could speed us on to our next stage in evolution, give everyone access to intelligence beyond their means, and enrich the lives of all people. Or it could enrich the lives of a very few while the wealth gap continues to widen and most of the world suffers.
It is often that our blessing is our curse and this is very much one of those situations. We stand on the verge of great breakthroughs in technology, and not just in AI. Robotics, space, energy, quantum computing, and medicine all stand to benefit from what is coming. The very way we live life on planet earth could be about to change. What it means to be human could be changing too.
We may all find ourselves strangers in a strange land, and what does that do. We always looked to the stars for a benevolent advanced technology to share the secrets of the universe but what if we’re the ones to invent the transcendent technology?
