But, I am worried about human adaptability, as it will be much lower and slower than machine adaptability, unless we ourselves become the machines, i.e.integrate their advantages immediately those advantages appear. Otherwise, we will be left behind, and we all know what happens to species that don’t adapt or adapt more slowly than other species. Lets not delude ourselves that we’re not creating (one or more) new species here, albeit artificial.

That said, with less brevity I will say that I have read news reports of a government grant, given to the EE department of a large midwestern university, to be used to construct a predictive model of the economy. And I know of a number of startups based on using computer modeling as a tool in trading financial instruments. Were I to guess that the intention of the founders was to make money, I would, again, only be speculating. But I can say with certainty that the utility function with which the developers evaluated the efficacy of their models was, in all cases, based on making a profit.

My observation is that the “scarcity model” seems to be a deeply-entrenched component of the human condition which is reinforced by our being the result of billions of years of evolution based on the competition for resources. From a mathematical standpoint, I do not believe that stochastic ‘selection of the fittest’ based on competition is the only mechanism which generates successful evolution. Said another way (with a nod to the great William Calvin), Calvin’s ‘Darwin machine’ may not be the only set of rules which will produce a progressively better fit to the environment. In an important way, this can be the difference between proactively designing a selection mechanism, or passively allowing the existing accidental one to continue driving evolution. (As Keith Henson of “Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition” says, “Nature evolved the bird; man designed the 747.”) Unfortunately, competitive selection mechanisms are the only examples we have inherited on this planet, so it will require true visionaries to imagine a better way. (By this, I mean, in a Buddhist way, an evolutionary mechanism which generates as a side-effect greater aggregate joy and less aggregate pain.) Perhaps the foible of embodying competitive selection can be corrected as humans are uploaded into the post-synchronicity world.

Are we up to the challenge?

The potentially worrying scenario is when robotics/AI becomes sufficiently advanced that robots do a better job at anything, including maintaining robots, programming, and regulating. Currently their functionality is still so limited that the new, complex needs that are created by their own existence create new jobs for us. This will probably not always be the case.

I’m not too worried myself, though. If there is one thing humanity has shown to excel at, it’s adapting to new circumstances – if unemployment and ubiquitous technology are in our future, we’ll learn how to cope with it (though it may prove to be a somewhat bumpy ride).

But for a chance for this agenda to actually happen, each Watson has to be (secretely) nurtured as politicians wouldn’t allow to be made obsolete in less than 10 years from now!