“By 2040, adjunct intelligence will be everywhere, exercising a dramatic effect on each person’s identity and individual perception. AI’s collective powers and uber-reasoning are arriving as a silent encroaching on human consciousness. This impinging is happening without much bother or awareness beyond cultural enthusiasm for AI. AI will be behind the tech curtain, contained and operating in almost everything we touch and invested in our objects and inventions.
“The embedding of AI will be both a convenience and a point of contention as we enhance our lives with it and entwine our lives with its hidden presence, which will create a tech-paranoia backlash as jobs are lost to AI and the digital divide widens.
“AI encroaching on human consciousness will demand that humans become more meta-aware – realizing it is how we entrain with our tools that alters our thinking and behaviors. This is not a new phenomenon but we have never before encountered a technology as powerful and pervasive as AI.
In 2040, the effects of Mind2 on society are profound. AI does not represent the end of humanity; it represents the end of humanity’s sole interpretation of reality, of what is, of what will or could be. Perception will start to become a shared resource, like computer programs or data. The individual mind, celebrated throughout human history, will give way to accessed mind. … We will use AI as a partner, a sounding board, a retriever. But we, ourselves, will no longer be the sole entity in the room.
“As Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher, the authors of The Age of AI write: ‘For humans accustomed to agency, centrality and a monopoly on complex intelligence, AI will challenge self-perception.’
- “By 2040 AI will be more refined and accommodating, funneling our desires and living inside almost everything – our light switches, our vehicles, our devices and computing tablets, our classrooms and offices. AI will be designed to enhance (by assisting) our thinking and actions, and much of this will be below cognition. For example, doctor visits will not always require ‘going to the doctor’ as we will have a monitoring chip inside our bodies that, via AI, will record and convey to our doctors how we’re feeling, our heartrate, our blood pressure, our temperature and gut health. What will happen when AI knows us better than we know ourselves?
- “AI feeds on data – vast quantities of data – this single fact becomes an arbiter of the future and a harsh critic of the past. Previous civilizations had no data stores, no data mining mechanisms, no endless data flows that supported or refuted assertion, conjecture, invention. What the data says is a profoundly different question than what the prophet says. Data access and analysis is a completely different dynamic than inherited, traditional rules and rule-based behavior; it ignores ‘thou shalt’ and ‘thou shalt not’ while favoring the restless movement of data, increasingly presented in colorful and well-designed visualizations. Having said that, junk data will become a thorny problem, as unscrupulous and self-serving actors and social media platforms work to manipulate public opinion or foment discord for audience ratings and metrics.
“To understand the truly profound change of AI as an adjunct to human intelligence, consider the Cartesian assumption, ‘I think therefore I am.’ This (usually unspoken) assumption has informed most of Western thinking. Descartes could not have imagined, ‘I think with the assistance of neural networks.’
“Historically time was our assistant to sort out truths from falsehoods, or at least provide enough commentary that theories like Earth-centrism or bloodletting were eventually abandoned. Yet individual thinkers had to wait for other individual thinkers to undermine dogma. As a result, throughout history our heroes were solo (usually embattled and threatened) figures shining the light of wisdom into the darkness of ignorance and prejudice, from Socrates and Plato to Galileo, Einstein, and Picasso.
“With the proliferation of AI and the iterative improvements of artificial general intelligence (AGI), individual insight and perception will join with other insights and probabilities and algorithms to produce knowledge. As a result, individual perception will matter less and collective facticity will matter more.
Authorship and individual copyright mean something different (have no meaning?) in a Mind2 world where every notion, every song, every script or book can be rewritten, revised, rethought. Thought itself is no longer housed within one brain but is the end product of a shared brain.
“Our past history will be seen as faltering missteps because it was not data-based, while we will have to grapple with the retreat of personal vision and the arrival of Mind2. Mind2 is the collective mind; the accessed mind; the mind of everyone, which uses the enlightened individual mind multiplied by many minds. The perceptions of Malcolm X or Riane Eisler or Yuval Noah Harari can now be boosted and amalgamated and restated and improved by others.
“Authorship and individual copyright mean something different (have no meaning?) in a Mind2 world where every notion, every song, every script or book can be rewritten, revised, rethought. Thought itself is no longer housed within one brain but is the end product of a shared brain. Or, as the authors of The Age of AI say,’… to achieve certain knowledge we may need to entrust AI to acquire it for us and report back.’ This is a new kind of thinking that uses human thought but is not solely human thinking. In this hybrid partnership, humans will learn from machine learning.
“How will social, economic and political systems change by 2040? Here are some of likely possibilities:
- “In 2040 AI will have enabled a much less ad hoc and more-programmed existence. We will rely on AI to count our hours of sleep and monitor their quality; food will go through an AI filter, tracking pollutants, carcinogens and pathogens, as well as quality of nutrition; dating and mating will continue its trend away from accidental encounters to programmatic readings of others’ likes and dislikes, physique and interests; work will be AI-mediated, with every sophisticated job entailing an AI component and machine-learning knowledge. This more-programmed existence will be the core of a business model for dozens of companies who will consider it their mission to deepen human reliance on AI and neural networks.
- “In 2040, the effects of Mind2 on society are profound. AI does not represent the end of humanity; it represents the end of humanity’s sole interpretation of reality, of what is, of what will or could be. Perception will start to become a shared resource, like computer programs or data. The individual mind, celebrated throughout human history, will give way to accessed mind. Thinking will happen with our fingers (as we use some screen-mediated tool) or with brain-prompts through smart glasses mediated by, say, eye blinks; these prompts will be neurally accessible as our tools follow more pathways through the human nervous system. We will use AI as a partner, a sounding board, a retriever. But we, ourselves, will no longer be the sole entity in the room.
- “Economics will be driven by climate change mitigation and AI-enabled technologies. In business, medicine, politics, war and other fields, any endeavor will be significantly affected by simulation: a sim will become de rigueur for any proposed action or expenditure. Simulation may replace knowing: that is, knowing a thing will become the ability to simulate and thereby test and examine it.
- “Politics will become a proxy theater for feuds over rules-based-order traditions and practices versus AI-ruled disruptive technologies. Terrorist groups or lone-wolf threats (a la the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski) are at one level an outcry against the takeover of technology in human affairs and a fear of the end of traditional rules-based dogma. But many will not see the world that way; they will see politics in the words (propaganda and rationales) of actors who do not see or think or act from the meta level, but chant and rehash arguments from past traditions. By 2040 the inertia of the prior order of church, school and government – alphabetic order writing and rules tool logic – will be shown to be in a soundless collision with the tool logic of facticity and data-fueled AI. This collision must be navigated wisely to avoid misguided tension, casting AI as a detriment and inherited dogma as capable of informing existential threats.
“In addition, some other things will stand out when it comes to the gains and losses for individuals and society. The adoption and integration of neural networks into vast areas of human life will be primary. Layers of programmed intelligence will affect how we think, act and perceive the world. Central to this revolutionary adoption of new technologies are the huge data stores on which AI depends.
“Prior human existence was not data-dependent. Ignorant and self-serving autocrats, religious leaders or politicians made pronouncements that were often backed up by force, and subjects or believers had no choice but to abide by this ignorance. But data remakes the world.
“We will gain not only the ability to access all human knowledge and understanding, we will gain a valuable adjunct to human perception. Whether testing and finding new drugs, mitigating climate change or finding workable, peaceful solutions to age-old territorial and political conflicts, AI will provide us with numerous new alternatives we had only dreamt of before. Further, AI will develop solutions human perception has not considered, or, given our biological substrate, we were not designed to consider
“Many questions of human interest can be affected or answered by sufficient accurate data. This is one of the most significant developments resulting from our adoption of AI. Data skewers past assumptions for having little or no data support and it points towards newer, revolutionary developments that data enables. We are moving from a rules-based order derived from religious and territorial hegemonies to neural network rules, AI rules that are software and machine-learning based. This is a change so profound it reaches into every area of human life, from religion to medicine to war and politics.
“We will gain not only the ability to access all human knowledge and understanding, we will gain a valuable adjunct to human perception. Whether testing and finding new drugs, mitigating climate change or finding workable, peaceful solutions to age-old territorial and political conflicts, AI will provide us with numerous new alternatives we had only dreamt of before. Further, AI will develop solutions human perception has not considered, or, given our biological substrate, we were not designed to consider (e.g., AI has made moves in Chess and Go that no human has ever tried).
“Much of this gain will be due to moving from (occasionally) inspired assertions to data-driven understanding and conclusions. The beneficial effects of a data-first, facticity approach cannot be underestimated. This is not how we have behaved historically, and it blows apart many cognitive commitments of our past including territoriality, religious beliefs, relations between the sexes, human rights, aging and intelligence quotients, to name a few.
Expecting governments to sufficiently regulate AI would be like thinking that knowing the government-set speed limits was enough know-how to drive a Ferrari. My candidate for watching how we use AI is AI itself. We need to build monitoring and assessment tools into AI, not, by any measure, to create draconian Big Brother oversight protocols, but to assess and report on how WE are changing as we use AI.
“We will also gain another important perspective: AI will allow us to watch ourselves using AI. One of the most important uses of AI will be to use AI to monitor and report on how we change our perceptions and behaviors as we use AI. In the next 15 years one of the things most likely to be lost due to our fascination with deploying AI is oversight, our meta perspective.
“This is thinking about the changes in our thinking and behaving as we use AI and it could not be more important. Since we always entrain with our tools, we will use AI to help us in myriad spheres. Understandably, we will relegate oversight of AI solely to governments. It is not that we do not need regulation of the role of AI in the public square; we do, but that is not enough. We need to watch ourselves as we’re using AI to create a fuller understanding of how AI changes how we think and act.
“Expecting governments to sufficiently regulate AI would be like thinking that knowing the government-set speed limits was enough know-how to drive a Ferrari. My candidate for watching how we use AI is AI itself. We need to build monitoring and assessment tools into AI, not, by any measure, to create draconian Big Brother oversight protocols, but to assess and report on how we are changing as we use AI. Go here to read more from me on that subject.”
This essay was written in November 2023 in reply to the question: Considering likely changes due to the proliferation of AI in individuals’ lives and in social, economic and political systems, how will life have changed by 2040? This and more than 150 additional essay responses are included in the report “The Impact of Artificial Intelligence by 2040.”