The Fourth Age

Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity

Byron Reese

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501158582
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

" The Fourth Age not only discusses what the rise of A.I. will mean for us, it also forces readers to challenge their preconceptions. And it manages to do all this in a way that is both entertaining and engaging." — The New York Times As we approach a great turning point in history when technology is poised to redefine what it means to be human, The Fourth Age offers fascinating insight into AI, robotics, and their extraordinary implications for our species. In The Fourth Age, Byron Reese makes the case that technology has reshaped humanity just three times in history: - 100, 000 years ago, we harnessed fire, which led to language.- 10, 000 years ago, we developed agriculture, which led to cities and warfare.- 5, 000 years ago, we invented the wheel and writing, which lead to the nation state.We are now on the doorstep of a fourth change brought about by two technologies: AI and robotics. The Fourth Age provides extraordinary background information on how we got to this point, and how —rather than what —we should think about the topics we'll soon all be facing: machine consciousness, automation, employment, creative computers, radical life extension, artificial life, AI ethics, the future of warfare, superintelligence, and the implications of extreme prosperity.By asking questions like "Are you a machine?" and "Could a computer feel anything?", Reese leads you through a discussion along the cutting edge in robotics and AI, and, provides a framework by which we can all understand, discuss, and act on the issues of the Fourth Age, and how they'll transform humanity.

Part One THE LONG, HARD ROAD TO TODAY

THE STORY OF PROMETHEUS

The story of Prometheus is an ancient one, at least three thousand years old, and probably much older. It goes like this: Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus, both Titans (children of the gods, who came before the classical Olympian gods), were tasked with making all the creatures of the earth. Using clay, the brothers got to work. Epimetheus worked quickly making the animals, just slapping them together, and giving each of them one of the attributes Zeus had provided them to distribute. Some of the animals were thereby made cunning, some could camouflage themselves, some had fierce fangs, and some could fly. Prometheus, on the other hand, was a careful worker, and spent a great deal of time making just one creature—man—crafting him in the image of the gods, walking erect. By the time Prometheus was finished, he found out that his brother had given away all the gifts to the animals. One can almost picture Prometheus looking at the empty box that the gifts had been in, saying to his brother, “Dude. Really?” So Prometheus decided to do the one thing he was forbidden to do: give man fire. For this transgression, he paid a terrible price: he was sentenced by Zeus to be bound to a rock and to have an eagle pluck out his liver, which regrew every night, only to be torn out again the next day. This went on for eons until at last he was freed by Hercules.

1 The First Age: Language and Fire

While no one knows when isolated individual humans first harnessed the power of fire, we have pretty good evidence that around 100,000 years ago we gained widespread mastery of it. And it is easy to see in the much more recent Greek myth of Prometheus an eons-old memory of how dramatically fire changed us. Fire was the original multifunction technology. It provided light, and, because animals feared it, it also provided safety. Its portability meant that humans could migrate to colder climates and bring warmth with them. But far and away, its greatest benefit was that it let us cook food.

Why was this particular use of fire so important? Cooking allowed us to vastly increase our caloric intake. Not only does cooking meat make it easier to chew, but, more important, it unwinds the proteins within it, allowing for better digestion. And, on top of all that, with fire, scores of inedible plants suddenly became food sources, since fire could break down all the indigestible cellulose and starch found in them. Fire enabled us, in effect, to “outsource” part of our digestive process. It is quite difficult to get the number of calories humans require today with just raw food, since so many pass through the body undigested.

How did we use all the new calories we were able to consume? We used this new energy to grow our brains to unprecedented complexity. In a short period, we grew to have three times the number of neurons as gorillas or chimpanzees. Such a brain, however, is like an Italian supercar: it can go from zero to sixty in the blink of an eye, but it sure burns the gas doing so. Humans, in fact, use an incredibly lavish 20 percent of all of the calories we consume just to support our advanced brains. Few other creatures use even half that much energy to power their intellects. From a survival point of view, this was a pretty bold bet. To borrow a phrase from poker, humans went “all in” on the brain, and it paid off, for our more powerful brains led to our creation of another new technology: language. Language was the great leap that the historian Will Durant says “made us human.”

So fire began the great romance we still have today with technology. What is technology? Throughout this book, when I use that term, I mean the application of knowledge to an item, process, or technique. And what is technology for? Primarily for enhancing human ability. It allows us to do things we couldn’t do before, or allows us to do things we could do even better.

Certainly, we had used simple technology before fire. Over two million years before, in fact. But fire was different, special. It still seems a sort of magic. Even today, campers sit around the fire at night, staring into it, transfixed by its otherworldly dance.

The vastly more powerful technology of language allowed us to exchange information. With it, you can encapsulate something you have learned, like “Tigers don’t like to have their tails pulled,” in a way that can efficiently travel from person to person, far beyond the one-handed man who had the original experience. Additionally, language enabled us to cooperate with each other, which is one of our singular abilities as a species. Without language, a dozen people were no match for a woolly mammoth. But with language, those people could work together in a way that made them nearly invincible.

Language came about because of our bigger brains, and in a virtuous cycle, language in turn grew our brains even bigger, as there are kinds of thoughts we cannot think without words. Words are symbols, after all, for ideas, and we can combine and alter those ideas in ways that are inconceivable without the technology of speech.

Another gift of language is stories. Stories are central to humanity, for they gave form to human imagination, which is the first requisite for progress. Oral chants, the progenitors of today’s ballads, poems, and hip-hop songs, were probably early creations of speaking humans. There is a reason that things that rhyme are more memorable than things that don’t. It is the same reason that you can remember song lyrics better than a page of prose. Our brains are wired that way, and it is that fact that allowed The Iliad and The Odyssey to be preserved in oral form before the invention of writing. This also explains why the opening theme songs for TV shows like Gilligan’s Island, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Brady Bunch are forever etched into my mind, in spite of my not having seen those shows for decades. It is notable that those songs are stories themselves, even including the words “story” and “tale” in their lyrics. It is speculated that our oldest stories, like the epic of Gilgamesh, probably existed in oral form for millennia, until the invention of writing allowed them to be jotted down.

We don’t know much about our earliest language other than what we can infer from our languages today. The original tongue of humans is long gone, as are the many forms that came after it. We group present-day languages into families that are derived from theorized protolanguages. One such language is Proto-Indo-European, from which 445 languages today descend. These include Hindi, English, Russian, German, and Punjabi.

Philologists study protolanguages by looking at similarities between words across languages. In 2013, researchers from the University of Reading in England employed this sort of analysis to find the oldest words we use. Their research found twenty-three “ultraconserved” words that have likely sounded largely the same for fifteen thousand years, meaning they reach back to a protolanguage that existed even before Proto-Indo-European. These most ancient of words include “man,” “mother,” “two,” “three,” “five,” “hear,” “ashes,” and “worm.” The oldest word of all may be “mama” or something like it, given that in a large variety of languages, the word for mother begins with the m-sound, often the first sound a baby can make.

And then, intriguingly, we have languages that seem to have no linguistic antecedents, languages that seem to have come out of nowhere. Basque, spoken by the people who inhabit the mountains between Spain and France, is one such example. It is thought by many to be a language older than the Proto-Indo-European tongue, and there is a legend among the Basques that theirs is the language that was spoken by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

The versatility and complexity of language are amazing. English recently passed a million unique words, although most of us get by using only about twenty-five thousand. A new English word is coined approximately every hour, although that pace is slowing. Back in the day, someone like Shakespeare would make up three words before breakfast. The leading theory as to the culprit behind this recent slowdown in new words is automatic spell-checkers, which simply won’t put up with that kind of horseplay. And unless you want to send an email with lots of red scribbles under your so-called words, you had better use stuff already on the approved list.

During this time, the First Age (the roughly 100,000 years in which we lived as hunter-gatherers with both language and fire), what was life like? The total population of humans was around 200,000, so while we were not an endangered species, the survival of humanity was far from certain. Although there was undoubtedly a wide variation of practices, a large number of these people lived in collectivist, largely nonhierarchical societies. As recently as 1700, there were still over fifty million hunter-gatherers spread across the globe, so we have a good deal of firsthand observations about “modern” hunter-gatherers. Even today, the best estimates suggest that there exist more than a hundred uncontacted hunter-gatherer tribes, whose members may number a total of over 10,000 people.

If modern examples of hunter-gatherers are any indication of life before agriculture, we can infer that sustenance was not something one could take for granted, and that any individual was just a few days’ illness away from death. As such, a general collectivism likely arose from each individual having a compelling, self-interested motive for helping others: even the strongest members of a society would need help themselves someday. For this reason, groups that shared were likely to be more resilient than their more selfish brethren. Besides, what was the point of accumulating wealth? There was no wealth beyond the day’s haul of grubworms and no way to store wealth even if it was there. Humans lived day to day, eking out a meager existence, just one bad winter or rogue mammoth away from an untimely demise.

Modern-day followers of Rousseau have a tendency to look back on this time through the rose-colored glasses of romanticism, harking back to a simpler time, when humans lived in harmony with nature, uncorrupted by the trappings of the modern world. Most of us, if dropped back into that time to live out our days, would likely not conclude these were the good old days. To begin with, times were violent. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker estimates that, based on studies of ancient human remains, nearly one in six ancient hunter-gatherers met with a violent end at the hands of another human. Compare this with just the one in thirty who died such a death in the “bloody” twentieth century, with its two world wars. Thus we can confidently say that life as an ancient hunter-gatherer was short, painful, and harsh. But this was humanity’s proving ground, and with language, we embarked on the path that brought us to today.

2 The Second Age: Agriculture and Cities

After about 100,000 years of humans chatting away while they hunted and gathered their way through the day, something dramatic happened that profoundly altered humans and our society once again: we invented agriculture. The Second Age began just 10,000 short years ago, when the human population of the planet was about four million people, a little more than the current population of Los Angeles. In those 90,000 intervening years, we managed to double our population a mere four or five times. That is incredibly meager growth, indicative of the precariousness of our existence.

Agriculture, like language, is also a technology, and like language, agriculture brought about a slew of other advances. The first of these was the city, which came about as agriculture required that humans settle down in one place. This practice was almost entirely new. Early cities, such as Çatalhüyük, Jericho, and Abu Hureyra, were often located near rivers for access to water and fertile farmland, and had markets, homes, and temples. It was during the Second Age that we began using opium, gambling with dice, and wearing makeup and gold jewelry.

Cities promoted commerce and the exchange of ideas, but they also made us completely and irrevocably stationary. Housing was permanent. We altered the land through dikes and terraces. We built fences. And we buried and marked the location of our dead for later homage. These practices, and dozens more, were nails in the coffin of our wandering nature. There would be no turning back.

The second technological advance to come along with agriculture was the division of labor. While this may not seem like such a complex idea, the impact of the division of labor marks the major milestone in the history of humanity. With the division of labor, instead of each individual doing all of the things necessary for survival, individuals specialize in narrower tasks, and by doing so gain efficiencies, which allow for tremendous economic growth. Along with trading and technological advances, the division of labor is one of only three “free lunches” in conventional economic theory—that is, one of the ways overall wealth can be increased without anyone’s having to work any harder.

Agriculture didn’t give us the division of labor directly. It gave us cities, and cities gave us the division of labor. How? The division of labor works the best when large numbers of people live in close proximity. Farmers who may have lived far from their neighbors couldn’t really specialize, and thus were by necessity jacks-of-all-trades but masters of none. Imagine how unproductive you would be if, instead of your current job, which you are presumably pretty good at, you had to do everything for yourself, from sewing your own clothes to making your own soap. Archaeological evidence from the oldest cities suggests that there was a range of different jobs from the beginning of the Second Age. Humans reaped the incredible economic advantages of specialization the moment that they started living in close proximity with large numbers of other humans.

The division of labor makes cooperation between humans go from optional to required. The famous essay by the economist Leonard Read, “I, Pencil,” describes how although no one person knows how to build a simple pencil, the pencil still gets made, because thousands of people in hundreds of fields, who will never meet, each do a small part of each thing that it takes to make a pencil. The division of labor gives us virtually everything we have today. Without it, we would perish.

Weapons for organized warfare are another technology that came along because of the city. They were invented out of necessity, because the city concentrated wealth and needed to be defended. The earliest cities were often walled, which is achieved only through great effort and expense, implying that the risks of invasion were real, or at least perceived to be.

As a result of agriculture and cities, humanity had individual private ownership of land for the first time. Humans, being territorial, have probably always defended a loosely defined area they regarded as their own, but we have archaeological evidence from the beginning of the Second Age that borders were often well defined. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought of this practice as the beginning of our modern world, and stated that “the first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine,’ and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society.”

Agriculture and privately owned land ended the economic equality of the First Age. The natural inequality of ability, birth, and luck led to unequal accumulations of wealth. Although coinage in the modern sense didn’t exist at this time, the idea of wealth certainly did. One could own land, cattle, and silos for storing grain. That wealth could be accumulated indefinitely, with no upper limit on how rich a person could be. Since land could be farmed and cattle could reproduce, early wealth was income producing. As such, holdings of wealth tended to grow. Given that wealth could be passed down from generation to generation, it could accumulate and compound over multiple lifetimes.

Sadly, it was in the Second Age that the practice of human enslavement began. Slavery made little financial sense in a hunter-gatherer world, where wealth was nonexistent or at the most ephemeral, lasting only a day or two. But with cities, land ownership, and stores of wealth, our innate acquisitiveness was kindled, and was further stoked by memories of times of privation. The hunger for wealth seems to be limitless, at least in some, as is evidenced by those who feverishly work to earn their second billion, even with the full knowledge that they won’t ever, in a hundred lifetimes, spend their first.

Slavery presented no real ethical challenge for a world that didn’t have a notion of human rights or individual liberty. Only later, as civilization progressed, did the immorality of the institution become glaringly obvious.

Over time, some people amassed more land and capital than others. As society became wealthier, complexity arose. Trade became more sophisticated. Technology advanced and cities grew. All of this together raised the upper limit of the amount of wealth a single person could accumulate.

An unintended consequence of the agricultural revolution was that while more food could be produced, food could also be withheld from people. In a hunter-gatherer world, that wasn’t really possible, but with cities and agriculture, withholding food was a way for those in power to silence opposition, while distributing food was a way to ensure obedience. This is still done in parts of the world today.

It is against this backdrop that people separated into the rulers and the ruled. Aristocracy and royalty emerged during the Second Age. The ruling classes frequently adopted practices that those they ruled over were not permitted, such as wearing certain types or colors of clothing, eating certain foods, or, in the case of the Aztecs, smelling certain types of flowers.

This is also where the tension between two values, freedom and equality, was first highlighted. As the historian Will Durant points out, you get to pick only one, because you can’t have them both. People truly free will become unequal. People with equality forced on them are not free. This tug-of-war still plays out today.

Earlier, I referred to imagination as the first requisite for progress. Agriculture gave us the second. Since planting and harvesting crops required planning in a way that hunting and gathering did not, we can think of the invention of agriculture as the inventio...