Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla; Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google; Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg; DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis of AlphaGo fame; Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and the list goes on. Musk is launching the startup Neurolink to hack human brains and link them with computers.
Put their work together and it would mean it will change the world as we know it by pushing the power of machines to new, unknown outer limits and make it into something we can’t now imagine.
In the tsunami of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the purpose of humans would be put under question with a lot of people destined to become surplus whose existence makes little difference. True, a few people would survive and thrive on in the brave new world where it is possible to raise efficiency to the level that is thought to be impossible in the age of humankind.
The writing has been on the wall. AlphGo beat the best human go player, showing the possibility that this game of brainpower dating from eons ago can turn into merely a test of computing mettle. Reports have it that most of jobs as we know them can and will be replaceable _ even high-skilled professions won’t remain immune for long.
Amid this change of this age, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s leading philanthropists, suggested taxing robots.
Some disparage Gates’ idea as an innovation killer, claiming that it will stand in the way of the new wave of industrialization that is just beginning. Or others would say that it would only make things complicated, considering the modus operandi of taxation for robots that are hard to define.
A great number of people suffered in the previous changes of industrial revolutions _ from agriculture to manufacturing, and manufacturing to communication. It was the survival of the fittest on a global scale. The upcoming revolution would be incomparably bigger than the previous ones.
It is time to make preparations _ setting rules for relations between machines and people and finding ways of having machines best serve people. Or it can’t be ruled out that people will be herded into camps under the watch of robot sentinels or, as shown in the movie, “The Matrix,” turn into millions of biological battery cells to power the machine world.
That may be extreme but it only adds to the case to take Gates’ word seriously and start doing something about the uncertain future.