Читать книгу The Next Generation - Ryan Tony - Страница 12

Prepare yourself and your children for a Second Renaissance of extraordinary innovation. This near future may include additive printers and molecular reassemblers that can create most physical products at minimal cost. The sale of products may be displaced by an economy based predominantly on intellectual property. The concept of scarcity could be supplanted by an environmentally sustainable abundance of low-cost goods and services for all people.

Work, in its present form, may become a distant memory, superseded by a hybrid synergy between humans and artificial intelligence. All education and training may be provided by advanced one-on-one personalised artificial intelligence systems. Housing, constructed by giant 3D printers, could be one-tenth of its present cost. Each of these prospects is speculative, although they are all distinct possibilities.

How far might these technologies expand? Most of them will pale into insignificance if teleportation is ever developed. The capacity to travel across the world in an instant would revolutionise the transport industry! Facebook have committed to a form of teleportation by 2025 – on a virtual platform, at least.²⁰ However, the National Technological Initiative, a Russian consortium that directs massive funding into state-sponsored development, predicts it will have developed basic teleportation by 2035.²¹

Early efforts will involve the transfer of very simple forms of matter, but the eventual realisation of human teleportation would comprehensively alter the way we live on planet Earth. Will we see it in the next 100 years? It's unlikely, although you learn to never say never when it comes to future possibilities. Science fiction has a way of becoming science fact.

Such an exhilarating future may require ways of thinking beyond our present capabilities. In chapter 2, we will explore whether our children will require brain augmentation to match advances in artificial intelligence. But here's a different perspective. There is an all-natural option for improving our thinking. What if we learned how to fully utilise the vast untapped potential of our own brain?