Will Artificial Intelligence Lead to a New Species of Humans?
Now that it's Kamala Harris vs JD Vance, the question becomes: And will they all be rich?
The presidential race has turned into Harris v. Vance. Trump is clearly incapacitated. If he somehow wins, we have to assume Vance and the cabinet will invoke the 25th Amendment to try to show Trump the door within the first few months. They’ll need buy-in from Trump to achieve this if they can’t get 2/3 of Congress to agree. But it isn’t an impossibility that they could get the two-thirds they need from both houses of Congress. He’s that far gone.
Barring that, they can just bribe Trump, perhaps with a midnight flight out of the country to a place without extradition agreements with the United States.1
This instantly transforms the 2024 presidential race into the most ridiculous October surprise ever: Kamala Harris versus JD Vance.
Or, as we say in hyperbole land, the angel versus the demon.
This will be the first, and maybe only, battle over who oversees the emergence of AI.
If you think AI and the various technologies associated with it seem crazy now, just wait a few years. It won’t be long before augmented humans blur the line between humans and machines. This isn’t the notion of your local, crazy sci-fi writer. Serious people with PhDs have been talking about this for years.
Who will be the winners and losers of the AI Revolution?
The answer may lie in teeth.
One of the most fundamental features of a fancy-looking human often comes down to one thing: Do they have enough money to maintain or develop a fantastic smile?
What do expensive teeth have to do with AI, the inquisitive reader wants to know?
Everything.
You see, augmented humans are already among us. Their augmentation is simple, often cosmetic, but they’re here. And it takes a ton of cash to become one of them.
Maybe the whole process started with the classic nose job. I don’t know, really, and I’m not silly enough to research it. One thing is certain: Plastic surgery isn’t trending among the poor and downtrodden.
The Singularity
In 2005, a computer scientist named Ray Kurzweil wrote a book called The Singularity is Near, which predicted that artificial intelligence would not only overtake human intelligence by 2045 but that humans would probably augment themselves to the point that the very nature of being human would change.
The question becomes, who? Who will benefit from this sleek future?
Unless you’ve got gobs of money, probably not you. It’s gonna take pailfuls of money. Simple augmentations, like brand new teeth, are already expensive.
Complex ones involving AI will most likely be affordable by an elite few.
One way to get an idea of what I mean is to take a look at a newfangled, albeit low-tech, non-AI goody: an anti-aging formula that boosts your body’s nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD for short.
NAD is a naturally occurring coenzyme that plays a key role in your metabolism. Metabolism, in turn, is, essentially, the process of turning what we eat into the essence of who we are.
This is why we say things like, “You are what you eat.” If you eat lots of bad foods and drink a lot of booze, your body will let you know. Metabolism will let you know.
But the quality of our metabolism also deteriorates naturally with age. As scientists and genetic engineers learned more about the process, they developed a formula that they christened NAD+, which improves the natural behavior of NAD.2
Early field tests of the formula are promising. It is said to reduce the effects of aging through cellular repair. They used high-tech to make it, but you use low-tech to pop the pill. A three-month supply costs $100+.
That’s by no means unaffordable, but it’s also not something you can justify to your inner accountant if you’re barely making rent.
When you take a deeper dive into higher-tech human enhancement trends, it’s not a stretch to conclude that only a few lucky people will be able to afford most of the coming augmentations.
That’s because things start to get really expensive when you look at the more exciting stuff.
Stuff+ is gonna cost you.
The cost of human enhancement technology
Tech that improves sight and hearing is one example. The cost of a bone-anchored hearing aid (BAHA) can range from $4,500 to $8,000, although in some countries, its costs might be covered by the government.
According to eSight, a developer of eyesight assistance hardware and software that provides eyesight to legally blind people, you’ll pay about $7,000 for a device that looks a little like a VR headset.3
More futuristic enhancements include bioprinting, which uses 3D printing techniques to generate living tissue, including skin and bone. The hope is that someday it will generate new organs.
Then there’s Guardian XO. Guardian XO is, according to its manufacturer, “a full-body industrial exoskeleton robot” that “is the perfect synergy of human and machine. It is revolutionizing the way work gets done.”4
Think Pacific Rim, without the angry subterranean dude as your boxing opponent:
The Japanese, who have been players in the robotics field for a long time, are also heavily involved in robotic exoskeletons for humans.
For example, Cyberdyne, a Japanese robotics company, linked up with Tsukuba University to create HAL, an exoskeleton based on a prototype by Yoshiyuki Sankai, who spent three years mapping the neurons that govern human leg movement.
Want something darker?
Elon Musk’s Neuralink is trying to develop a working brain-computer interface (BCI). You can bet that Elon will charge a pretty penny for it after he’s finished killing all the animals required to ramp things up.
Neuralink has the additional benefit of being an Elon Musk outfit, so it’s already rife with questionable practices (like killing monkeys). It’s been accused of killing 1500 animals5 and has been investigated by the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Inspector General.6
I know I can’t afford this kind of stuff. But then, I can barely afford a coffee grinder.
Did you notice the progression of the examples I’ve included here? We went from pretty teeth to brain-computer interfaces. The costs will be progressively expensive, too, as the complexities increase.
Moral considerations, too, will continue to accelerate but will pass most of us by because modern humans tend to stay in their lane as they focus on paying ever more for rent and high-tech cars while fleeing climate-enhanced disasters.
An AI economic apocalypse?
This brings me to Daron Acemoglu and Simon H. Johnson. The two economists won this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics, along with James A. Robinson.
Acemoglu and Johnson are economists at MIT who wrote a 546-page tome called Power and Progress that pushes back on the notion that technology automagically leads to improvements in economic progress.
In fact, they say that the winners of technological progress are always the capitalists who were already in control of the economy. But these guys are no socialists.
Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
A traditional economic centrist, Acemoglu scored a lot of his creds with two books on how the economics of dictatorships turn countries into failed states: Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (2006) and Why Nations Fail (2012).
The second book was a smash hit in economic circles. It declared that authoritarian states run their economies into the ground. It was well received because the theory has proven true.
Now, in their book Power and Progress, Acemoglu and Johnson have gathered substantial evidence to show that major technological advances during the last ten centuries have benefitted a central caste of power elites, but not the workers the advancements replaced.
The workers that were replaced were hammered by rising poverty as they were relegated to second-class citizenship. The book also describes how other segments of society also suffered hardships.
Given that the book is 500+ pages, you can imagine that they are going to give you lots of examples. I’ll stick to a few that will resonate.
Early advances in agriculture
Acemoglu and Johnson’s research showed that Medieval and early modern agricultural workers didn’t benefit from improved plows, ox-drawn carts, or even crop rotation. Their feudal overlords did.
Even today, mechanical harvesters and other modern farm equipment that have improved farm productivity are now mostly being taken advantage of by huge farms operated by agribusiness corporations while the American small farmer is wiped off the map.
Advances in ship design
The authors note that ship design improvements made it easier to navigate oceans. These same ship designs also led to the Middle Passage, which delivered slaves to the Americas under miserable conditions.
The cotton gin
Americans were taught in school that the cotton gin was a boon to cotton production. It was. It turned the United States into the world’s largest cotton exporter and helped build a North American empire.
But it also further entrenched the horrors of slave owners who brutalized African prisoners providing them free labor.
British textile factories
One of the mainstays of the British industrial revolution was its infrastructure of textile factories. Rather than help workers, according to Acemoglu and Johnson, the factories led to longer worker hours, lower wages, and horrible conditions.
Modern horrors continue. In 2013, a textile plant in Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,134 people. The accident wasn’t directly caused by machinery. However, the fact that there were so many workers in one place running textile machines was a side-effect of the Indian subcontinent’s low-wage industrialization.
Artificial fertilizers
The authors also point to the German chemist Fritz Haber’s advancement in artificial fertilizers, which he and other German scientists later used as a basis for chemical weapons that devastated the World War One battlefields.
Trumpism
According to the authors, “Spectacular advances in computers have enriched a small group of entrepreneurs and business tycoons over the last several decades, whereas most Americans without a college education have been left behind…”
The authors don’t go on to specifically link these changes to Trumpism, but I will. As we all know, there is a large segment of unhappy Americans who feel left behind by politicians, tech companies, and science.
Those advances also personally benefited me as a software engineer, so trust me, I’m not decrying that trend. That’s not what this is about. What alarms the authors, and me, is the unabated march of money out of our hands and into the hands of a few.
The Rise of the AI Machines
Suddenly, almost overnight, many workers are faced with an onslaught of machines and software that can do their jobs. From legal beagles to writers to coders, it’s hitting everyone.
Meanwhile, videos called deepfakes can trick viewers into thinking they’re watching real people do everything from saying terrible things to having sex with monkeys.
If you think things are bad now, just give it a decade as bad actors use AI to create an entire layer of AI-generated videos showing people doing things they didn’t do. It’s already happening to women as men with grudges find photos of female faces and attach nude bodies to them through generative AI.
You’ve already seen CGI bring dead actors back to life in movies such as “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” (Peter Cushing).7
The Trump campaign has used AI to produce numerous lies about Kamala Harris and Trump’s various targets. A Vance administration is likely to advance this effort exponentially.
So far, it doesn’t take much effort to identify much of what we see as computer-generated, but remember, it wasn’t all that long ago that people were writing their novels on Selectrics. It won’t be long until we can’t distinguish fake from reality.
But aren’t we all better off?
Acemoglu and Johnson aren’t suggesting that technology hasn’t been beneficial to society as a whole. It has. They’re not Luddites.8
Their book points to a ton of benefits derived from technology. For example, in the later stages of industrialization, wages rose 123%. The endless working days of early industrialization eventually became eight or nine-hour days, and life expectancy rose.
China saw hundreds of millions of people enter the middle class from deep levels of rural poverty. There’s a thriving class of Indian and East European software engineers. Etc., etc.
AI is having a positive impact in many, many areas, such as medical technology and scientific research.
Turning off technology would be very silly, even if it could be done.
So, yes, society has benefitted from technological change. But not without a fight.9 Workers had to build unions and codify protections against things like child labor into law. A war was fought in America over slavery.
Acemoglu is worried that AI may tip the scales regarding wide-ranging benefits. He’s worried that the only beneficiaries of AI in the long run will be the people at the highest level of the world’s power structure and that the long run is fast approaching.
What does the future look like?
Business Insider’s Aki Ito describes a series of long conversations with Acemoglu, who has over the last several years become cozy with a number of AI technologists:
Over the course of three conversations this summer, Acemoglu told me he’s worried we’re currently hurtling down a road that will end in catastrophe. All around him, he sees a torrent of warning signs — the kind that, in the past, wound up favoring the few over the many.
Power concentrated in the hands of a handful of tech behemoths. Technologists, bosses, and researchers focused on replacing human workers instead of empowering them. An obsession with worker surveillance.
Record-low unionization. Weakened democracies. What Acemoglu’s research shows — what history tells us — is that tech-driven dystopias aren’t some sci-fi rarity. They’re actually far more common than anyone has realized.10
Acemoglu foresees a system of haves and have-nots that will make our current system look like a benign and loving world family in comparison:
“There’s a fair likelihood that if we don’t do a course correction, we’re going to have a truly two-tier system,” Acemoglu told me. “A small number of people are going to be on top — they’re going to design and use those technologies — and a very large number of people will only have marginal jobs, or not very meaningful jobs.” The result, he fears, is a future of lower wages for most of us.
Acemoglu says that AI has the potential to benefit humanity on a mass scale, but that the way our current system is set up is likely to result in the opposite.
He doesn’t want to put a halt to AI. Even if he did, the genie is out of the bottle.
Instead, Acemoglu wants to be certain that the levers for controlling it are in the hands of the people who should benefit from it. He wants you and me to control it, not a small group of tech entrepreneurs who, if handed the keys to such awesome power, will probably roll over us without mercy.
This means that it is madly essential that we keep the levers of control away from the likes of JD Vance, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel, all of whom are convinced they know better than the rest of us about what direction AI, and humanity, should go, and who should decide our fates.
I wrote a novel about this theme, probably around the same time Acemoglu and Johnson were thinking about it. My novel MagicLand is set 2,000 years in the future, long after the tech elites have decided on what to do with the pesky peasants who demand more control over their lives.
The history of MagicLand is based on the very real possibility that the elites could simply grow tired of the rest of us, and snuff us out like insects.
In MagicLand, that is what they do. As they begin to attain Kurzweil’s singularity, as they augment themselves into a new species, the elites in the novel decide to simply do away with those who didn’t possess enough money to join the party. They launch a series of three major eradications to simply wipe them out.
If you don’t think that it’s possible for a small group of elites to decide it will be easier to simply wipe out large populations instead of, for example, assisting the millions of climate refugees drowning in the mud of Bangladeshi cyclones, you missed the history lessons of World War Two.
In the MagicLand timeline, eventually, two new human species develop. One is an augmented species, the other consists of survivors who miraculously rediscover the power of magic.
Realistically, that second development is wishful, fantasized thinking (but it made for some fun world-building).
The reality will be much different unless we seize control now.
The first step in that process is making sure Kamala Harris defeats JD Vance for the presidency.
The second step is perhaps a bit more complicated.
One step at a time. If we don’t accomplish the first step, it’s game over. The second step will never make an appearance.
Notes
Thanks for reading!
Federal pardons won’t be enough. States will still be able to prosecute him. They’d have to bribe him out of the country, most likely. The trick will be finding a non-extraditing nation that has plenty of McDonald’s.