Your Personal Sim: Part 1 — Your Attention Please

A Multi-Part Series, Posted on Wednesdays on Medium

Part 1 — Your Attention Please: A New World Is Almost Upon Us

Summary (tl;dr)

• This series will explore the five- to twenty-year future of smart agents and the knowledge bases they use and build. These may be the most socially important forms of AI that will emerge in the coming generation.
• As we’ve seen in the headlines about deep learning since 2012, the AIs are presently awaking all around us, whether we want them to or not. They are also coming in our image — in their neural form and function — again whether we want them to or not. To paraphrase futurist Stewart Brand, “We are gaining superpowers, so we better get good at using them.”
• A new kind of software agent called a personal sim is the most empowering and intimate form of AI on the horizon. We’ll soon be using sims that model our interests, goals, and values in their knowledge bases, and which act as our assistants and digital interfaces to the world.
• In their early years we’ll likely think of sims as bright but slightly autistic children, much better at many tasks than we are, but still unschooled and unwise in many ways. At the same time, the knowledge bases our sims use will be full of errors, and won’t be sufficiently open at first.
• The takeaway from this series will be that we will need to build and raise our sims and their knowledge bases well, with love and care, as they will be central to how billions of us live our lives in the 2020s and beyond.

Article

For the article and comments, see Your Personal Sim: Part 1 on Medium, thanks.

Author

John Smart is a futurist exploring the intersection of technology and culture from universal, acceleration, and evo-devo-based perspectives. These posts are excerpted from his new 15 chapter book on the foresight profession, The Foresight Guide. The Guide will posted free online, as a permanent, page-commentable blog, on June 30th at ForesightGuide.com. To be reminded when it goes online, leave your email address at ForesightGuide.com.