The Brave New World of Smart Agents and their Data

A Multi-Part Series

Part 1 — Your Attention Please
Part 2 — Why Agents Matter
Part 3 — The Agent Environment
Part 4 — Deep Agents (this post)
Part 5—Deep Training

More soon…
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Why will our smart agents and sims soon become as indispensible as the web and our smartphones are today? Why will we think of our sims as “our better selves” by 2030? To understand this key aspect of our global future, our next two posts will take a deep look at deep learning, a new paradigm of not only machine learning, but of future computer development.

These two will be long posts, but they are about the technology behind the greatest story of our collective future, the advent of machines that think and feel like us, so I make no apologies for their length. Plenty of people will write the short versions. But there are many doubts and misconceptions on these topics, so the length will hopefully clear up a few of both.

There are also some rewards at the end, to make up for this post’s length. The first reward is the “Mind Meld” (aka, “Merging With our Sims”, or “Slippery Singularity”) prediction. This is a big reward, as it explores how humanity will use deep learning to solve the greatest tragedy presently inflicting our planet — the inevitable death of each and every one of us, due to the disposable nature of human biology. I think this mind meld future is inevitable, and when it comes later this century, hundreds of millions of us, at the very least, will use it to move easily into postbiology as our biological bodies age and die.

Once mind melding happens at scale, and we see that it works, cultures everywhere will stop pretending that human mental death is a good thing, and we’ll upgrade our religious faiths (which will never go away) to be consistent with a new world of indefinite human lifespan, for all who desire it. The second reward is more prosaic, some powerful investment tips you can implement today in the Calls to Action at the end.

The Rest of this Post (on Medium)