Future Tense: Chapters 21–23

And the euphoria it produces is so intense that love can be considered a positive addiction when the feeling is mutual and the relationship and conduct are appropriate.

Unrequited love, rejection, and heartbreak are awful.

Even if you don’t want to go as far as Kondo and pledge your troth to a plush doll, you might want to improve your odds of love and decrease your odds of heartbreak and rejection, right?

Earth emerged from nonliving things. How did that happen? We aren’t certain. But one theory on this shift from nonliving to living is that it came from a cataclysm.

The hydrogen formed a dense atmosphere that would not dissipate for 200 million years.

In practice, though, the US has conducted mass surveillance, and the country has also used surveillance to silence political dissenters.

It was inadvertently trained to do this.

More than 1 million Uighurs have been sent to concentration camps, in violation of human rights laws, to the extent that the US government sanctioned 28 Chinese companies for mass arbitrary detention and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups.

He was also one of the 20th century’s most prolific and popular science fiction writers, penning dozens of short stories, and several novels about robotics—a word he coined.

Those would be grievous alignment problems, at least from the perspective of the human developers.

They don’t necessarily understand language and the nuances behind it as humans do.

And as we develop this technology, inevitably reaching for artificial general intelligence, we have to be guided by a sense of ethics that will save us from the worst effects of our ambition.

This is the culmination of thousands of years of human curiosity, imagination, and invention.

There are collective actions, including advocating for thoughtful regulations of the technologies and taxation policies that account for the effects this wave of technology will have on the workforce.

And we can ensure that we make smart choices with our education and work, and in building our communities so that no one is left behind in the upheaval that’s certain to come.