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#432303 What If the AI Revolution Is Neither ...
Why does everyone assume that the AI revolution will either lead to a fiery apocalypse or a glorious utopia, and not something in between? Of course, part of this is down to the fact that you get more attention by saying “The end is nigh!” or “Utopia is coming!”
But part of it is down to how humans think about change, especially unprecedented change. Millenarianism doesn’t have anything to do with being a “millennial,” being born in the 90s and remembering Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It is a way of thinking about the future that involves a deeply ingrained sense of destiny. A definition might be: “Millenarianism is the expectation that the world as it is will be destroyed and replaced with a perfect world, that a redeemer will come to cast down the evil and raise up the righteous.”
Millenarian beliefs, then, intimately link together the ideas of destruction and creation. They involve the idea of a huge, apocalyptic, seismic shift that will destroy the fabric of the old world and create something entirely new. Similar belief systems exist in many of the world’s major religions, and also the unspoken religion of some atheists and agnostics, which is a belief in technology.
Look at some futurist beliefs around the technological Singularity. In Ray Kurzweil’s vision, the Singularity is the establishment of paradise. Everyone is rendered immortal by biotechnology that can cure our ills; our brains can be uploaded to the cloud; inequality and suffering wash away under the wave of these technologies. The “destruction of the world” is replaced by a Silicon Valley buzzword favorite: disruption. And, as with many millenarian beliefs, your mileage varies on whether this destruction paves the way for a new utopia—or simply ends the world.
There are good reasons to be skeptical and interrogative towards this way of thinking. The most compelling reason is probably that millenarian beliefs seem to be a default mode of how humans think about change; just look at how many variants of this belief have cropped up all over the world.
These beliefs are present in aspects of Christian theology, although they only really became mainstream in their modern form in the 19th and 20th centuries. Ideas like the Tribulations—many years of hardship and suffering—before the Rapture, when the righteous will be raised up and the evil punished. After this destruction, the world will be made anew, or humans will ascend to paradise.
Despite being dogmatically atheist, Marxism has many of the same beliefs. It is all about a deterministic view of history that builds to a crescendo. In the same way as Rapture-believers look for signs that prophecies are beginning to be fulfilled, so Marxists look for evidence that we’re in the late stages of capitalism. They believe that, inevitably, society will degrade and degenerate to a breaking point—just as some millenarian Christians do.
In Marxism, this is when the exploitation of the working class by the rich becomes unsustainable, and the working class bands together and overthrows the oppressors. The “tribulation” is replaced by a “revolution.” Sometimes revolutionary figures, like Lenin, or Marx himself, are heralded as messiahs who accelerate the onset of the Millennium; and their rhetoric involves utterly smashing the old system such that a new world can be built. Of course, there is judgment, when the righteous workers take what’s theirs and the evil bourgeoisie are destroyed.
Even Norse mythology has an element of this, as James Hughes points out in his essay in Nick Bostrom’s book Global Catastrophic Risks. Ragnarok involves men and gods being defeated in a final, apocalyptic battle—but because that was a little bleak, they add in the idea that a new earth will arise where the survivors will live in harmony.
Judgement day is a cultural trope, too. Take the ancient Egyptians and their beliefs around the afterlife; the Lord of the underworld, Osiris, weighs the mortal’s heart against a feather. “Should the heart of the deceased prove to be heavy with wrongdoing, it would be eaten by a demon, and the hope of an afterlife vanished.”
Perhaps in the Singularity, something similar goes on. As our technology and hence our power improve, a final reckoning approaches: our hearts, as humans, will be weighed against a feather. If they prove too heavy with wrongdoing—with misguided stupidity, with arrogance and hubris, with evil—then we will fail the test, and we will destroy ourselves. But if we pass, and emerge from the Singularity and all of its threats and promises unscathed, then we will have paradise. And, like the other belief systems, there’s no room for non-believers; all of society is going to be radically altered, whether you want it to be or not, whether it benefits you or leaves you behind. A technological rapture.
It almost seems like every major development provokes this response. Nuclear weapons did, too. Either this would prove the final straw and we’d destroy ourselves, or the nuclear energy could be harnessed to build a better world. People talked at the dawn of the nuclear age about electricity that was “too cheap to meter.” The scientists who worked on the bomb often thought that with such destructive power in human hands, we’d be forced to cooperate and work together as a species.
When we see the same response over and over again to different circumstances, cropping up in different areas, whether it’s science, religion, or politics, we need to consider human biases. We like millenarian beliefs; and so when the idea of artificial intelligence outstripping human intelligence emerges, these beliefs spring up around it.
We don’t love facts. We don’t love information. We aren’t as rational as we’d like to think. We are creatures of narrative. Physicists observe the world and we weave our observations into narrative theories, stories about little billiard balls whizzing around and hitting each other, or space and time that bend and curve and expand. Historians try to make sense of an endless stream of events. We rely on stories: stories that make sense of the past, justify the present, and prepare us for the future.
And as stories go, the millenarian narrative is a brilliant and compelling one. It can lead you towards social change, as in the case of the Communists, or the Buddhist uprisings in China. It can justify your present-day suffering, if you’re in the tribulation. It gives you hope that your life is important and has meaning. It gives you a sense that things are evolving in a specific direction, according to rules—not just randomly sprawling outwards in a chaotic way. It promises that the righteous will be saved and the wrongdoers will be punished, even if there is suffering along the way. And, ultimately, a lot of the time, the millenarian narrative promises paradise.
We need to be wary of the millenarian narrative when we’re considering technological developments and the Singularity and existential risks in general. Maybe this time is different, but we’ve cried wolf many times before. There is a more likely, less appealing story. Something along the lines of: there are many possibilities, none of them are inevitable, and lots of the outcomes are less extreme than you might think—or they might take far longer than you think to arrive. On the surface, it’s not satisfying. It’s so much easier to think of things as either signaling the end of the world or the dawn of a utopia—or possibly both at once. It’s a narrative we can get behind, a good story, and maybe, a nice dream.
But dig a little below the surface, and you’ll find that the millenarian beliefs aren’t always the most promising ones, because they remove human agency from the equation. If you think that, say, the malicious use of algorithms, or the control of superintelligent AI, are serious and urgent problems that are worth solving, you can’t be wedded to a belief system that insists utopia or dystopia are inevitable. You have to believe in the shades of grey—and in your own ability to influence where we might end up. As we move into an uncertain technological future, we need to be aware of the power—and the limitations—of dreams.
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#432036 The Power to Upgrade Our Own Biology Is ...
Upgrading our biology may sound like science fiction, but attempts to improve humanity actually date back thousands of years. Every day, we enhance ourselves through seemingly mundane activities such as exercising, meditating, or consuming performance-enhancing drugs, such as caffeine or adderall. However, the tools with which we upgrade our biology are improving at an accelerating rate and becoming increasingly invasive.
In recent decades, we have developed a wide array of powerful methods, such as genetic engineering and brain-machine interfaces, that are redefining our humanity. In the short run, such enhancement technologies have medical applications and may be used to treat many diseases and disabilities. Additionally, in the coming decades, they could allow us to boost our physical abilities or even digitize human consciousness.
What’s New?
Many futurists argue that our devices, such as our smartphones, are already an extension of our cortex and in many ways an abstract form of enhancement. According to philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers’ theory of extended mind, we use technology to expand the boundaries of the human mind beyond our skulls.
One can argue that having access to a smartphone enhances one’s cognitive capacities and abilities and is an indirect form of enhancement of its own. It can be considered an abstract form of brain-machine interface. Beyond that, wearable devices and computers are already accessible in the market, and people like athletes use them to boost their progress.
However, these interfaces are becoming less abstract.
Not long ago, Elon Musk announced a new company, Neuralink, with the goal of merging the human mind with AI. The past few years have seen remarkable developments in both the hardware and software of brain-machine interfaces. Experts are designing more intricate electrodes while programming better algorithms to interpret neural signals. Scientists have already succeeded in enabling paralyzed patients to type with their minds, and are even allowing brains to communicate with one another purely through brainwaves.
Ethical Challenges of Enhancement
There are many social and ethical implications of such advancements.
One of the most fundamental issues with cognitive and physical enhancement techniques is that they contradict the very definition of merit and success that society has relied on for millennia. Many forms of performance-enhancing drugs have been considered “cheating” for the longest time.
But perhaps we ought to revisit some of our fundamental assumptions as a society.
For example, we like to credit hard work and talent in a fair manner, where “fair” generally implies that an individual has acted in a way that has served him to merit his rewards. If you are talented and successful, it is considered to be because you chose to work hard and take advantage of the opportunities available to you. But by these standards, how much of our accomplishments can we truly be credited for?
For instance, the genetic lottery can have an enormous impact on an individual’s predisposition and personality, which can in turn affect factors such as motivation, reasoning skills, and other mental abilities. Many people are born with a natural ability or a physique that gives them an advantage in a particular area or predisposes them to learn faster. But is it justified to reward someone for excellence if their genes had a pivotal role in their path to success?
Beyond that, there are already many ways in which we take “shortcuts” to better mental performance. Seemingly mundane activities like drinking coffee, meditating, exercising, or sleeping well can boost one’s performance in any given area and are tolerated by society. Even the use of language can have positive physical and psychological effects on the human brain, which can be liberating to the individual and immensely beneficial to society at large. And let’s not forget the fact that some of us are born into more access to developing literacy than others.
Given all these reasons, one could argue that cognitive abilities and talents are currently derived more from uncontrollable factors and luck than we like to admit. If anything, technologies like brain-machine interfaces can enhance individual autonomy and allow one a choice of how capable they become.
As Karim Jebari points out (pdf), if a certain characteristic or trait is required to perform a particular role and an individual lacks this trait, would it be wrong to implement the trait through brain-machine interfaces or genetic engineering? How is this different from any conventional form of learning or acquiring a skill? If anything, this would be removing limitations on individuals that result from factors outside their control, such as biological predisposition (or even traits induced from traumatic experiences) to act or perform in a certain way.
Another major ethical concern is equality. As with any other emerging technology, there are valid concerns that cognitive enhancement tech will benefit only the wealthy, thus exacerbating current inequalities. This is where public policy and regulations can play a pivotal role in the impact of technology on society.
Enhancement technologies can either contribute to inequality or allow us to solve it. Educating and empowering the under-privileged can happen at a much more rapid rate, helping the overall rate of human progress accelerate. The “normal range” for human capacity and intelligence, however it is defined, could shift dramatically towards more positive trends.
Many have also raised concerns over the negative applications of government-led biological enhancement, including eugenics-like movements and super-soldiers. Naturally, there are also issues of safety, security, and well-being, especially within the early stages of experimentation with enhancement techniques.
Brain-machine interfaces, for instance, could have implications on autonomy. The interface involves using information extracted from the brain to stimulate or modify systems in order to accomplish a goal. This part of the process can be enhanced by implementing an artificial intelligence system onto the interface—one that exposes the possibility of a third party potentially manipulating individual’s personalities, emotions, and desires by manipulating the interface.
A Tool For Transcendence
It’s important to discuss these risks, not so that we begin to fear and avoid such technologies, but so that we continue to advance in a way that minimizes harm and allows us to optimize the benefits.
Stephen Hawking notes that “with genetic engineering, we will be able to increase the complexity of our DNA, and improve the human race.” Indeed, the potential advantages of modifying biology are revolutionary. Doctors would gain access to a powerful tool to tackle disease, allowing us to live longer and healthier lives. We might be able to extend our lifespan and tackle aging, perhaps a critical step to becoming a space-faring species. We may begin to modify the brain’s building blocks to become more intelligent and capable of solving grand challenges.
In their book Evolving Ourselves, Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans describe a world where evolution is no longer driven by natural processes. Instead, it is driven by human choices, through what they call unnatural selection and non-random mutation. Human enhancement is bringing us closer to such a world—it could allow us to take control of our evolution and truly shape the future of our species.
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#431987 OptoForce Industrial Robot Sensors
OptoForce Sensors Providing Industrial Robots with
a “Sense of Touch” to Advance Manufacturing Automation
Global efforts to expand the capabilities of industrial robots are on the rise, as the demand from manufacturing companies to strengthen their operations and improve performance grows.
Hungary-based OptoForce, with a North American office in Charlotte, North Carolina, is one company that continues to support organizations with new robotic capabilities, as evidenced by its several new applications released in 2017.
The company, a leading robotics technology provider of multi-axis force and torque sensors, delivers 6 degrees of freedom force and torque measurement for industrial automation, and provides sensors for most of the currently-used industrial robots.
It recently developed and brought to market three new applications for KUKA industrial robots.
The new applications are hand guiding, presence detection, and center pointing and will be utilized by both end users and systems integrators. Each application is summarized below and what they provide for KUKA robots, along with video demonstrations to show how they operate.
Photo By: www.optoforce.com
Hand Guiding: With OptoForce’s Hand Guiding application, KUKA robots can easily and smoothly move in an assigned direction and selected route. This video shows specifically how to program the robot for hand guiding.
Presence Detection: This application allows KUKA robots to detect the presence of a specific object and to find the object even if it has moved. Visit here to learn more about presence detection.
Center Pointing: With this application, the OptoForce sensor helps the KUKA robot find the center point of an object by providing the robot with a sense of touch. This solution also works with glossy metal objects where a vision system would not be able to define its position. This video shows in detail how the center pointing application works.
The company’s CEO explained how these applications help KUKA robots and industrial automation.
Photo By: www.optoforce.com
“OptoForce’s new applications for KUKA robots pave the way for substantial improvements in industrial automation for both end users and systems integrators,” said Ákos Dömötör, CEO of OptoForce. “Our 6-axis force/torque sensors are combined with highly functional hardware and a comprehensive software package, which include the pre-programmed industrial applications. Essentially, we’re adding a ‘sense of touch’ to KUKA robot arms, enabling these robots to have abilities similar to a human hand, and opening up numerous new capabilities in industrial automation.”
Along with these new applications recently released for KUKA robots, OptoForce sensors are also being used by various companies on numerous industrial robots and manufacturing automation projects around the world. Examples of other uses include: path recording, polishing plastic and metal, box insertion, placing pins in holes, stacking/destacking, palletizing, and metal part sanding.
Specifically, some of the projects current underway by companies include: a plastic parting line removal; an obstacle detection for a major car manufacturing company; and a center point insertion application for a car part supplier, where the task of the robot is to insert a mirror, completely centered, onto a side mirror housing.
For more information, visit www.optoforce.com.
This post was provided by: OptoForce
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#431925 How the Science of Decision-Making Will ...
Neuroscientist Brie Linkenhoker believes that leaders must be better prepared for future strategic challenges by continually broadening their worldviews.
As the director of Worldview Stanford, Brie and her team produce multimedia content and immersive learning experiences to make academic research and insights accessible and useable by curious leaders. These future-focused topics are designed to help curious leaders understand the forces shaping the future.
Worldview Stanford has tackled such interdisciplinary topics as the power of minds, the science of decision-making, environmental risk and resilience, and trust and power in the age of big data.
We spoke with Brie about why understanding our biases is critical to making better decisions, particularly in a time of increasing change and complexity.
Lisa Kay Solomon: What is Worldview Stanford?
Brie Linkenhoker: Leaders and decision makers are trying to navigate this complex hairball of a planet that we live on and that requires keeping up on a lot of diverse topics across multiple fields of study and research. Universities like Stanford are where that new knowledge is being created, but it’s not getting out and used as readily as we would like, so that’s what we’re working on.
Worldview is designed to expand our individual and collective worldviews about important topics impacting our future. Your worldview is not a static thing, it’s constantly changing. We believe it should be informed by lots of different perspectives, different cultures, by knowledge from different domains and disciplines. This is more important now than ever.
At Worldview, we create learning experiences that are an amalgamation of all of those things.
LKS: One of your marquee programs is the Science of Decision Making. Can you tell us about that course and why it’s important?
BL: We tend to think about decision makers as being people in leadership positions, but every person who works in your organization, every member of your family, every member of the community is a decision maker. You have to decide what to buy, who to partner with, what government regulations to anticipate.
You have to think not just about your own decisions, but you have to anticipate how other people make decisions too. So, when we set out to create the Science of Decision Making, we wanted to help people improve their own decisions and be better able to predict, understand, anticipate the decisions of others.
“I think in another 10 or 15 years, we’re probably going to have really rich models of how we actually make decisions and what’s going on in the brain to support them.”
We realized that the only way to do that was to combine a lot of different perspectives, so we recruited experts from economics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, biology, and religion. We also brought in cutting-edge research on artificial intelligence and virtual reality and explored conversations about how technology is changing how we make decisions today and how it might support our decision-making in the future.
There’s no single set of answers. There are as many unanswered questions as there are answered questions.
LKS: One of the other things you explore in this course is the role of biases and heuristics. Can you explain the importance of both in decision-making?
BL: When I was a strategy consultant, executives would ask me, “How do I get rid of the biases in my decision-making or my organization’s decision-making?” And my response would be, “Good luck with that. It isn’t going to happen.”
As human beings we make, probably, thousands of decisions every single day. If we had to be actively thinking about each one of those decisions, we wouldn’t get out of our house in the morning, right?
We have to be able to do a lot of our decision-making essentially on autopilot to free up cognitive resources for more difficult decisions. So, we’ve evolved in the human brain a set of what we understand to be heuristics or rules of thumb.
And heuristics are great in, say, 95 percent of situations. It’s that five percent, or maybe even one percent, that they’re really not so great. That’s when we have to become aware of them because in some situations they can become biases.
For example, it doesn’t matter so much that we’re not aware of our rules of thumb when we’re driving to work or deciding what to make for dinner. But they can become absolutely critical in situations where a member of law enforcement is making an arrest or where you’re making a decision about a strategic investment or even when you’re deciding who to hire.
Let’s take hiring for a moment.
How many years is a hire going to impact your organization? You’re potentially looking at 5, 10, 15, 20 years. Having the right person in a role could change the future of your business entirely. That’s one of those areas where you really need to be aware of your own heuristics and biases—and we all have them. There’s no getting rid of them.
LKS: We seem to be at a time when the boundaries between different disciplines are starting to blend together. How has the advancement of neuroscience help us become better leaders? What do you see happening next?
BL: Heuristics and biases are very topical these days, thanks in part to Michael Lewis’s fantastic book, The Undoing Project, which is the story of the groundbreaking work that Nobel Prize winner Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky did in the psychology and biases of human decision-making. Their work gave rise to the whole new field of behavioral economics.
In the last 10 to 15 years, neuroeconomics has really taken off. Neuroeconomics is the combination of behavioral economics with neuroscience. In behavioral economics, they use economic games and economic choices that have numbers associated with them and have real-world application.
For example, they ask, “How much would you spend to buy A versus B?” Or, “If I offered you X dollars for this thing that you have, would you take it or would you say no?” So, it’s trying to look at human decision-making in a format that’s easy to understand and quantify within a laboratory setting.
Now you bring neuroscience into that. You can have people doing those same kinds of tasks—making those kinds of semi-real-world decisions—in a brain scanner, and we can now start to understand what’s going on in the brain while people are making decisions. You can ask questions like, “Can I look at the signals in someone’s brain and predict what decision they’re going to make?” That can help us build a model of decision-making.
I think in another 10 or 15 years, we’re probably going to have really rich models of how we actually make decisions and what’s going on in the brain to support them. That’s very exciting for a neuroscientist.
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#431899 Darker Still: Black Mirror’s New ...
The key difference between science fiction and fantasy is that science fiction is entirely possible because of its grounding in scientific facts, while fantasy is not. This is where Black Mirror is both an entertaining and terrifying work of science fiction. Created by Charlie Brooker, the anthological series tells cautionary tales of emerging technology that could one day be an integral part of our everyday lives.
While watching the often alarming episodes, one can’t help but recognize the eerie similarities to some of the tech tools that are already abundant in our lives today. In fact, many previous Black Mirror predictions are already becoming reality.
The latest season of Black Mirror was arguably darker than ever. This time, Brooker seemed to focus on the ethical implications of one particular area: neurotechnology.
Emerging Neurotechnology
Warning: The remainder of this article may contain spoilers from Season 4 of Black Mirror.
Most of the storylines from season four revolve around neurotechnology and brain-machine interfaces. They are based in a world where people have the power to upload their consciousness onto machines, have fully immersive experiences in virtual reality, merge their minds with other minds, record others’ memories, and even track what others are thinking, feeling, and doing.
How can all this ever be possible? Well, these capabilities are already being developed by pioneers and researchers globally. Early last year, Elon Musk unveiled Neuralink, a company whose goal is to merge the human mind with AI through a neural lace. We’ve already connected two brains via the internet, allowing one brain to communicate with another. Various research teams have been able to develop mechanisms for “reading minds” or reconstructing memories of individuals via devices. The list goes on.
With many of the technologies we see in Black Mirror it’s not a question of if, but when. Futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that by the 2030s we will be able to upload our consciousness onto the cloud via nanobots that will “provide full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system, provide direct brain-to-brain communication over the internet, and otherwise greatly expand human intelligence.” While other experts continue to challenge Kurzweil on the exact year we’ll accomplish this feat, with the current exponential growth of our technological capabilities, we’re on track to get there eventually.
Ethical Questions
As always, technology is only half the conversation. Equally fascinating are the many ethical and moral questions this topic raises.
For instance, with the increasing convergence of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, we have to ask ourselves if our morality from the physical world transfers equally into the virtual world. The first episode of season four, USS Calister, tells the story of a VR pioneer, Robert Daley, who creates breakthrough AI and VR to satisfy his personal frustrations and sexual urges. He uses the DNA of his coworkers (and their children) to re-create them digitally in his virtual world, to which he escapes to torture them, while they continue to be indifferent in the “real” world.
Audiences are left asking themselves: should what happens in the digital world be considered any less “real” than the physical world? How do we know if the individuals in the virtual world (who are ultimately based on algorithms) have true feelings or sentiments? Have they been developed to exhibit characteristics associated with suffering, or can they really feel suffering? Fascinatingly, these questions point to the hard problem of consciousness—the question of if, why, and how a given physical process generates the specific experience it does—which remains a major mystery in neuroscience.
Towards the end of USS Calister, the hostages of Daley’s virtual world attempt to escape through suicide, by committing an act that will delete the code that allows them to exist. This raises yet another mind-boggling ethical question: if we “delete” code that signifies a digital being, should that be considered murder (or suicide, in this case)? Why shouldn’t it? When we murder someone we are, in essence, taking away their capacity to live and to be, without their consent. By unplugging a self-aware AI, wouldn’t we be violating its basic right to live in the same why? Does AI, as code, even have rights?
Brain implants can also have a radical impact on our self-identity and how we define the word “I”. In the episode Black Museum, instead of witnessing just one horror, we get a series of scares in little segments. One of those segments tells the story of a father who attempts to reincarnate the mother of his child by uploading her consciousness into his mind and allowing her to live in his head (essentially giving him multiple personality disorder). In this way, she can experience special moments with their son.
With “no privacy for him, and no agency for her” the good intention slowly goes very wrong. This story raises a critical question: should we be allowed to upload consciousness into limited bodies? Even more, if we are to upload our minds into “the cloud,” at what point do we lose our individuality to become one collective being?
These questions can form the basis of hours of debate, but we’re just getting started. There are no right or wrong answers with many of these moral dilemmas, but we need to start having such discussions.
The Downside of Dystopian Sci-Fi
Like last season’s San Junipero, one episode of the series, Hang the DJ, had an uplifting ending. Yet the overwhelming majority of the stories in Black Mirror continue to focus on the darkest side of human nature, feeding into the pre-existing paranoia of the general public. There is certainly some value in this; it’s important to be aware of the dangers of technology. After all, what better way to explore these dangers before they occur than through speculative fiction?
A big takeaway from every tale told in the series is that the greatest threat to humanity does not come from technology, but from ourselves. Technology itself is not inherently good or evil; it all comes down to how we choose to use it as a society. So for those of you who are techno-paranoid, beware, for it’s not the technology you should fear, but the humans who get their hands on it.
While we can paint negative visions for the future, though, it is also important to paint positive ones. The kind of visions we set for ourselves have the power to inspire and motivate generations. Many people are inherently pessimistic when thinking about the future, and that pessimism in turn can shape their contributions to humanity.
While utopia may not exist, the future of our species could and should be one of solving global challenges, abundance, prosperity, liberation, and cosmic transcendence. Now that would be a thrilling episode to watch.
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