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What the AI Age Needs Is a Bigger Purpose

요약 · Summary

If all you look at is jobs, AI looks like a bad deal. For anyone who wants to solve bigger problems, it's the opening of a dream. On Peter Diamandis, Massively Transformative Purpose, XPRIZE, and the strange job longevity science gets once we decide to leave Earth.

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What the AI Age Needs Is a Bigger Purpose

AI has a dark side, and it's real. It can take people's jobs, and it can make people wonder what they're for. YouTube and the rest of the internet are full of that story right now. But for people who want the world to change and move forward, people who want to solve problems and then bigger problems, a dream is opening up.

If you focus only on losing jobs, AI looks like a very bad thing. But what if AI helps cure cancer, cure glaucoma, solve autism, let deaf people hear, and heal diseases we call incurable? And what if all of that reaches everyone cheaply, so that tomorrow really is better than yesterday? I think we need to look at that side a lot more.

Whenever I think about this, I think of Peter Diamandis. He has said that at eight, watching Apollo 11 land on the Moon, he decided that going to space, and bringing humanity with him, was what he would do with his life. The phrase he keeps coming back to is MTP, a Massively Transformative Purpose. Salim Ismail laid out the idea in his 2014 book Exponential Organizations, and Diamandis has done more than anyone to spread it. His own MTP, in his words, is to "inspire and guide the transformation of humanity on and off the earth."

XPRIZE came out of that. In 1996 he offered $10 million to the first non-government team to fly a spacecraft that could carry three people to 100 kilometers, twice within two weeks. SpaceShipOne won it in October 2004, the teams chasing it spent more than $100 million, and the technology went on to Virgin Galactic. One of the starting points for private spaceflight, in a field only governments used to touch, was a $10 million prize.

I think that's the right direction. We should leave a planet where we keep taking each other's land and energy, and head out into space.

The comparison that comes to my mind is an uncomfortable one for a Korean. In 1592, after Toyotomi Hideyoshi ended Japan's century of civil war, he gathered the samurai who had been killing each other and invaded Korea. For Koreans it was a deep wound. Seen only from inside Japan, though, one reading is that it turned the swords of idle samurai and ambitious lords outward. Together they pushed as far as Pyongyang and, in the northeast, the Tumen River. The campaign failed in the end, but for those years they stopped fighting each other. Earth now holds an explosion of productivity and intelligence, and we shouldn't spend it fighting each other. That force needs to point outward, toward space: settle other planets, keep gathering energy, and invent all kinds of new ways to have fun out there.

This is where bio and longevity get a strange and fun new job. Until now we've studied medicine and biology to fix our diseases and our bodies' problems. To become a spacefaring civilization, we'll need bodies that can live in space. To reach places hundreds of light-years away we'll have to understand the body well enough to extend life, keep it safe on a long voyage, restore it from a backup after an accident, and survive in completely different atmospheres. We'll also need hobbies and culture we can enjoy out there, maybe even with aliens. These are all new problems, and they show where AI and robots are really needed.

XPRIZE has put a prize on the body side too. The biggest competition it's running now is XPRIZE Healthspan, and at $101 million it's the largest XPRIZE ever. The task is to restore muscle, cognitive and immune function in people over 50 by at least 10 years, with a goal of 20, using a treatment that takes a year or less. In August, 20 finalists were named, and PRG S&Tech from Busan, Korea, is one of the ten that received $1 million each. The finalists run trials through 2029 and compete for a grand prize of up to $81 million in 2030.

Like Luffy heading out onto the endless sea in One Piece, we have to keep sailing, with no end to the voyage. A captain and crew who've set sail don't care about petty fights with the neighbors anymore. All they care about is what fun is waiting beyond the horizon, and what they'll achieve out there.

That means using our imagination to picture a more exciting future, then talking about it and sharing it, because AI will learn from it and lead us that way. If all we write is blame, fights and frustration, that's what AI will learn. It's the same reason Diamandis launched the Future Vision XPRIZE this year, with more than $3.5 million for hopeful science-fiction films. More than 2,500 entries came in, and in September a film called The Gifted won.

Leaders have a duty to make the energy of our whole civilization positive. XPRIZE is an interesting attempt at that. It won't be the final answer, but it will at least help us take one step forward.

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