In the future, Automation will disrupt your job and AI will try to hack your brain and probably sooner than you think.
Basically technological innovation and artificial intelligence are going to accelerate at a pace we’ve yet to really comprehend. (Fifteen years ago, Facebook wasn’t even around. Now it’s so efficient at micro-targeting that it helped sway a democratic election. Imagine what it might be capable of in another fifteen years.) That means automation will likely disrupt your current job (and your next one, and the one after that), and you’ll be the target of attention-grabbing, behavior-modifying algorithms so exponentially effective you won’t even realize you’re being targeted.
You write that one of the only things we can be certain of going forward is some level of uncertainty. So what's the best course of action? Unless you are 80 years old or something, you will have to repeatedly reinvent yourself in the coming decades—you'll probably change your job a number of times.
The problem with this scenario is that it assumes that AI will kind of reach its maximum capacity by 2025, which is extremely far from the truth.
As individuals, what we can do is quite limited. If you are very rich and successful, then of course you have all the resources in the world to cushion yourself against these kinds of upheavals. But if you're an average person then you will need a lot of help.
Even if there is a new job, and even if you get support from the government to kind of retrain yourself, you need a lot of mental flexibility to manage these transitions. Teenagers or 20-somethings, they are quite good with change.
It’s important to give concrete examples otherwise it's only a lot of theory. So let's say you work in a bank and you have your successful career. And then after 10 years, your job has just been automated: you're trading the stock exchange and all of a sudden the algorithm is much better than you, so you lose your job.
How has your work changed your relationship to technology?
I don't have a smartphone. My attention is one of the most important resources I have, and the smartphone is constantly trying to grab my attention. There's always something coming in.
It's the same way with the other side of the coin, with greed. Because if you really want something—the perfect body, the perfect car—and you watch all these videos, you want it more and more. And if you don't have it, then you feel worse and worse that you don't have this kind of body, or you don't have this kind of car. So you just spent one hour feeding your cravings and your greed, and it's really not good for you.
So how do you get your news?
I rarely follow the kind of day-to-day news cycle. I tend to read long books about subjects that interest me. So instead of reading 100 short stories about the Chinese economy, I prefer to take one long book about the Chinese economy and read it from cover-to-cover. So I miss a lot of things, but I'm not a politician and I’m not a journalist, so I guess it's okay I don't follow every latest story.
Sides of a coin, I guess. Are there ways to harness the good without also getting the bad?
Hopefully the culmination of government regulation, and the pressure of the public, and the self-awareness and the intentions of people in the industry. Many people in the industry—certainly all of the engineers, and the scientists sort of leading this revolution—they don't have bad intentions. I guess there are a few with bad intentions. But most of them, they don't want to create some kind of creepy dystopia. In many cases, they just don't fully realize the implications and potential consequences of what they are developing. Hopefully, if we bring more attention to what is happening—and not just for the people in the industry itself, but the entire public—we can steer these developments in the right direction.