It’s certain that children born today will live in a world we cannot even imagine when they reach adulthood. However, we are still imposing knowledge from the world of yesterday, which will soon become archaic, onto our children as education, based on our near-future conditioning. Ray Kurzweil is the person most trusted for his predictions about the future, and the reason he holds this credibility is due to his contributions to many technologies we use today and accept as natural. Until recently, he was the chief engineer at Google. Technologies like optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and speech recognition are among the inventions he brought into reality. Last year, Kurzweil stated that ‘the next 100 years will see development equivalent to the last 20,000 years.’ However, last month, he reduced his 100-year forecast to just one year. You read that right: developments that will completely change our lives will happen within one year. In 2015, it was predicted that advancements in ‘artificial general intelligence’ would take 50 years to catch up with human intelligence. However, the progress made with large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini have become the early signs that the digital revolution is beginning to transform the physical world. This transformation will create leaps in three areas: energy, production, and healthcare. While all of them are exciting, energy, due to its strategic importance, is game-changing.
The potential to collect just one ten-thousandth of the sun’s energy could power the world for a year. Despite significant advancements in solar cells, we have yet to fully harness this potential. To clarify, the materials needed to capture energy via photovoltaics are expensive and inefficient. However, artificial intelligence is rapidly sifting through billions of chemicals and guiding innovations at a remarkable speed. Until November 1923, only 21,000 stable inorganic compounds were known in human history. Then, overnight, Google’s Gnome AI application increased this number to 421,000. When this discovery is applied to photovoltaic mega-projects, the cost of energy will approach zero.
Forgotten Changes
Undoubtedly, many readers of these lines will think this is an unrealistic dream or a science fiction scenario. However, I would like to remind them of developments in four areas. What was the cost of a photo 30 years ago? What effort and expense did people have to go through to watch a movie they wanted? How much did they spend to compile the repertoire of their favorite artists, and more importantly, how much did they pay to communicate with loved ones? Today, all of these costs have approached zero and have become ‘too cheap to steal.’
What will change?
The approaching zero cost of energy will make production and services abundant and easily accessible. In an article published in The Economist, Kurzweil predicts that industrial products ranging from food and clothing to electronics and cars will become extremely cheap. There are three reasons for this. First, research and development times will shorten, and costs will decrease. Second, items made with rare elements will be producible using more common materials. Third, robotic advancements will facilitate the extraction of raw materials. The same development will occur in chip production and performance. In November 2023, the best hardware was capable of 48 billion operations per second, while Nvidia’s b200 GPU increased this performance by more than tenfold, reaching 500 billion operations per second.
Now let’s move on to the most significant individual advancement: the field of medicine. Despite the major developments in medicine and pharmacology, we still know that, in many cases, we have to rely on doctors’ intuition. This means that a drug which works well for many people could potentially kill you, and we accept this because it is mentioned in the instructions that come with the medicine. Now, with molecular biosimulation powered by artificial intelligence, the human body’s reaction to a specific molecule is being predicted in advance. This will make it possible to eliminate billions of options in seconds to find the right molecule.
Until 2022, 190,000 protein structures had been identified. Last year, DeepMind’s AlphaFold discovered more than 200 million proteins, and these were made available to researchers for free to help develop new treatments. The next advancements will target protein complexes, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, and the entire body. As a result, today’s clinical trials will be considered primitive due to their slow and expensive nature. It will be impossible to simulate and study the similarity of all factors, including genetics, lifestyle, comorbidities, drug interactions, and disease variations.
Today’s scientific advancements offer an additional seven to eight weeks of life each year for citizens of the U.S. and the U.K. When artificial general intelligence fully decodes the mysteries of cellular biology, and the expected increase in life expectancy reaches 12 months annually, it will be possible to achieve ‘longevity escape velocity.’ People with the potential to access these advancements will need to wait until 2029–2035 and maintain a healthy lifestyle in the meantime to benefit from these opportunities. Once this point is reached, aging will no longer be a factor that increases the annual risk of death. According to Ray Kurzweil, ‘A longer and healthier life, free from the limitations of scarcity and fragility that have constrained humanity since its beginning, will be possible.’ Of course, these applications will be expensive at first, but like all technological breakthroughs, they will rapidly become more affordable and accessible to the masses.
Technology and Psychology
“At the point we’ve reached today, technology has taken away much of humanity’s power. We are defining artificial intelligence, yet we still don’t fully understand its psychological and sociological implications. Artificial general intelligence has not yet reached human intuition. This is why everything we do today intersects with both technology and psychology.
Until now, all inventions and the world and lifestyle we created were products of the human mind. Through music, sports, and art, people formed a culture. All developments in human history have been intertwined, and people lived in the world they were born into. The only exception to this was motor vehicles—within the same lifespan, people moved from horses to automobiles. However, today we live in a world vastly different from the one we were born into, and we are being swept along by a life that is rapidly changing beyond the organic developments we are used to. Artificial general intelligence is learning on its own and inventing, and now it has reached a stage where it can make decisions. This is a dangerous situation. Until now, the most dangerous invention—nuclear bombs—was controlled by a human, who would decide when to press the button. But now, the situation has changed, and artificial general intelligence has entered the stage of making decisions on its own.
No matter who holds power, it becomes dangerous when left unchecked. Artificial general intelligence is set to emerge as an uncontrolled force in the near future. There is no consensus among those who should be regulating this, and that’s a very dangerous situation. According to Harari, science is built on questioning and rejecting, not on simply saying ‘I know.’ However, what artificial intelligence presents will surpass human understanding and will be accepted as absolute truths.
Artificial general intelligence is emerging as an entity that is ‘all-knowing, all-powerful, immortal, and invisible, yet its actions are felt.’ Using this entity for the benefit of humanity could solve many of the world’s problems. For this, international cooperation, like during the COVID pandemic, is required. However, at this point, we see that those developing artificial general intelligence are continuing to work at full speed without proper security controls or understanding the potential consequences, all because they fear being left behind in the race.
Conclusion
One of the leading futurists of the last century, Isaac Asimov, said, ‘If robots gain autonomy, the first thing they will do is destroy humans.’ If we don’t move quickly toward international regulation, it is possible that we may reach the end of human control or even the end of history itself.
The next article will cover areas where humans still have influence, in the spaces artificial intelligence has yet to fill.
