THE FOURTH AGE:
SMART ROBOTS, CONSCIOUS COMPUTERS, and THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY
BYRON REESE
Author of INFINITE PROGRESS: How Technology Will End Ignorance, Disease, Hunger, Poverty and War
“Should We Fear or Embrace Artificial Intelligence?” – Wiredelta; 7-14-17
“What an Artificial Intelligence Researcher Fears about AI” – Scientific American; 7-14-17
“7 Reasons You Should Embrace, Not Fear, Artificial Intelligence” – Futurism; 3-31-17
From movies like the Terminator franchise to the latest news headlines, we’re bombarded with contradictory but often alarming messages about the future: Machines will take our jobs. Robot overlords will rule us. AIs will keep us as pets. Technology will enable the rich and powerful to enslave the poor and weak. Experts such as Elon Musk, Steven Hawking and Bill Gates fear artificial intelligence and express concern that it may be a threat to humanity’s survival in the near future. While Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Ng, and Pedro Domingos find this viewpoint so farfetched that it seems hardly worth rebuttal. These men are all intelligent and informed people, and each group is as confident in its position as they are scornful of the other side. So who should we believe?
Technology guru Byron Reese shows us that these different viewpoints arise not because these experts know different things, but because they believe different things. And in THE FOURTH AGE: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity (Atria Books; $27.00; on sale: April 24, 2018), he gives us a framework to better understand our own beliefs about humanity’s future. He offers fascinating insight into our rapidly changing technology and its extraordinary implications for our species. THE FOURTH AGE is timely, urgent, and full of fascinating information that thoughtfully addresses the sense many of us have that the world we live in is on the cusp of a great and irreversible change.
We often talk about how we live in an age of change, by which we usually mean technological innovation: smart phones, the Internet, iPads, self-driving cars, and so on. But Reese explains that fundamental changes in the human experience occur very rarely. In fact, things have genuinely, irreversibly changed only three times in human history, each moment marked by the simultaneous arrival of certain “bundles” of technology.
100,000 years ago, we harnessed fire, which led to language.
10,000 years ago, we developed agriculture, which led to cities, the division of labor, and warfare.
5,000 years ago, we invented the wheel and writing, which lead to the nation state.
Now, however, we are approaching a major transformation that will bring us into the fourth age of humankind. This shift is the most drastic one of all, with several life-changing technologies converging on us at the same time in a perfect storm. We are building robots that can do human jobs. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) might be less than a decade away. There is real evidence to suggest that we may be on the verge of creating a new life form: a conscious computer to which we could outsource our thinking minds with a companion robot to perform the functions of our bodies. Reese believes that we will probably see more change in the next 50 years than we have seen in the last 5000.
Many of us are approaching this next stage of humanity with conflicted feelings. We are nervous, excited, overwhelmed, unsure of what this brave new world will mean for us, both practically and existentially. We find ourselves asking:
Byron Reese has spent his entire career exploring these questions, and in THE FOURTH AGE he offers us a way to understand the world of tomorrow without resorting to the doomsday view that the media often portrays. Reese’s view is much more optimistic, but rather than providing answers from a soapbox, his goal is to give us the tools to answer the questions ourselves. Reese accomplishes a formidable synthesis of technology, sociology, history, economics and philosophy in this book, and he has a knack for finding the perfect anecdote, study, or historical precedent that makes even the most complex ideas accessible.
THE FOURTH AGE by Byron Reese puts us at a great turning point in human history and will provide readers with the vocabulary and the understanding they need to be part of the debate about what kind of world we will soon inhabit.
BYRON REESE is the publisher of tech news site Gigaom.com. He has obtained or has pending numerous patents in disciplines as varied as crowdsourcing, content creation, and psychographics. The websites he has launched, which cover the intersection of technology, business, science and history, have together received over a billion visitors. He is the author of the acclaimed book, Infinite Progress: How Technology and the Internet Will End Ignorance, Disease, Hunger, Poverty, and War, and the founder of several non-profit organizations. He currently serves as Chief Executive Officer for Knowingly, a venture-backed Internet startup based in Austin, TX.