E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten
Indset The Quantum Economy
20001. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-3-8437-2495-1
Verlag: Ullstein HC
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Saving the Mensch with Humanistic Capitalism
E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-8437-2495-1
Verlag: Ullstein HC
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Anders Indset ist Wirtschaftsphilosoph, Unternehmer, Investor und ehemaliger Leistungssportler. Der gebürtige Norweger ist dreifacher Spiegel-Bestseller-Autor und wurde von Thinkers50 als einer der künftig einflussreichsten Denker in den Bereichen Technologie, Führung und Wirtschaft ausgezeichnet. Er ist ein vertrauter Sparringspartner für Top-Führungskräfte und Gründer des Quantum Economy Institutes.
Weitere Infos & Material
1. A Revolution of Consciousness or the Collapse: It’s Up to You!
I’ve talked to leading scientists, read a myriad of studies, and above all, I’ve traveled to places where things are already on fire. To Africa, where the once-believed uninhabitable desert regions are growing. To Antarctica, where icebergs the size of entire cities are melting and causing rising sea levels. To China, where not only is there environmental destruction, but also the automation of entire industries. To Indonesia, where the sea glitters romantically in the sunlight—only this glitter comes mainly from plastic garbage that floats in the waves and suffocates millions of sea dwellers.
Over the next ten years, humanity will be confronted with two existential challenges: how can we avoid the threat of ecological collapse, and how can we deal with, and even harness, exponential technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, and nanotechnology to help us make this world a truly human paradise, and not a post-human hell in which our descendants are either zoo animals or vegetative zombies?
Nothing less than the existence of the human species is at stake. That’s why I think it’s so important to eliminate trivializing terms such as climate change or global warming from our vocabulary. What is happening is not a simple “change” that is just going to let us enjoy a little more of the sun’s heat. The climate is in imminent danger of collapse. Still, the actual greatest threat of our time is the belief that someone else will come and save us. While new technologies can help us avert ecological collapse, they will not do so on their own—we must make a conscious decision about what we want to achieve with their help.
If we do not make this decision, we risk falling victim to a second existential challenge that may be even greater than the coming ecological crash: the disempowerment of humanity by hyper-intelligent machines. The problem is even more threatening because the danger is present in everyone’s minds, but mostly as a fantasy of computer nerds and science fiction stories from Hollywood. But this threat is just as real as climate collapse; we just don’t feel it as immediately. In fact, we have no emotional reaction to it whatsoever. This is one reason why we need a global revolution of consciousness: if we all understand and accept that these challenges are existential, we still have time to save our planet, to ensure the survival of our species, and to extend our humanistic foundations.
In ten years, large parts of Africa will be uninhabitable as a result of climate collapse, precisely on the continent where the population is growing the fastest—from 1.3 billion today to an expected 4 billion by the end of the century. Millions of people will flee to Europe and hundreds of thousands will drown in the Mediterranean and die of thirst in the deserts if we don’t act now.
In ten years, robots with superhuman intelligence will dominate our everyday lives. We will no longer be the most intelligent species on this planet.
In ten years, production and logistics will largely be automated, and millions of blue-collar jobs will be cut worldwide. Among those affected will be low-wage industries in Asia, which have become moderately prosperous as extended workbenches for Western industrialized countries and are now under threat of falling back into unemployment and poverty. The manufacturing of smartphones, tablets, toys, and textiles will largely be shifted back to Europe and America, where the buyers of the products live. Because robots are equally cost-effective regardless of where they are located, and fully automated local processes can minimize the costs of the last mile of the supply chain.
The Chinese e-commerce company JD.com, also known as Jingdong, is almost there already. Within the next two to three years, the multibillion-dollar company—little known in the West—aims to become 100 percent automated, including delivering their products using drones and facial recognition. Google invested $550 million in JD.com in 2018, and it almost went unnoticed because around the same time President Trump ramped up his trade war with China. The investment is evidence of the strategic cross-border collaboration that continues to take place, even at a time of growing political distance between the two countries.
In ten years, millions of jobs will be lost in Europe and America. Companies still talk about human resources and human capital, but we urgently need to rethink our models and what we want to achieve. Because if the algorithms are capable of one thing, it’s the efficient use of resources. Bus and taxi drivers, accountants and clerks, salespeople and agents, managers and factory workers will simply no longer be needed in the automated world.
What will happen to all these people who suddenly become superfluous? How will they live? Will they somehow accept their fate of suddenly being irrelevant, or will we face unrest, uprisings, and the collapse of our society? Right-wing populist parties already enjoy an increasing amount of support from voters; how many more concerned citizens will follow them when the economy really goes downhill?
“It won’t be that bad,” you might argue. “And new jobs will be created, too—programmers, software developers, and others will certainly be needed on a massive scale.” Unfortunately, this won’t happen to the large extent you may think. The robots of the future will be controlled by self-learning algorithms that will develop themselves on their own, and even write their own new software. And a bus driver or an accountant can’t turn into a software developer overnight. In any case, most of the jobs that will be lost simply won’t be replaced.
Robot doctors with computer chip brains will provide us with medical care and, if necessary, prescribe drugs. Robots will care for us—not sometime in the distant future, but in ten years or less. They’ll build our houses, do our housework, and oversee our factories. Cars, trains, buses, airplanes, and helicopters will drive and fly autonomously. Translators and editors, composers and screenwriters are already being replaced by machine successors, and soon we won’t notice any qualitative differences. If anything, we’ll see improvements. Machine-generated works will entertain us more imaginatively and touch us more deeply and emotionally. Diagnoses and prescriptions from algorithmic doctors will be more precise and effective than those of their biological predecessors. And the rate of accidents caused by automated road and air traffic will fall to a fraction of today’s numbers.
Artificial intelligence will be superior to us in almost every respect. It will also be better in terms of focus and priority setting. Algorithms will be able to precisely stimulate and perfectly simulate human emotions. Although they will not have human-like consciousness, most artificially intelligent machines will likely have some form of self-awareness. But their cold, logical calculations will prevent them from being triggered by stress and running blindly in circles, as humans often do.
This is why we need new models and a new definition of work. And when it comes to artificial intelligence, we need some kind of a global referee, a higher-level instance of control that we don’t yet have today. It is certainly possible for us to find new solutions, and the Q Economy is my first attempt to create such a new approach. But the task ahead requires you to get involved as well: together we will improvise the future.
Put on your quantum glasses
When you start to see the world from a quantum perspective, you’ll be surprised by how much already exists on the subject. In the new branch of quantum cognition, for instance, attempts are being made to model cognitive phenomena such as information processing in the human brain using the mathematical formulas of quantum theory. In the media, a wide range of fields are becoming associated with the word quantum—from “quantum behavior” to “quantum medicine,” from “quantum creativity” to “quantum capital.” A myriad of short videos, models, and examples have been used to try and make the bizarre effects of quantum mechanics comprehensible to non-physicists as well.
The German-American political scientist Alexander Wendt has established himself as a “quantum sociologist” by predicting that science will have to fundamentally rethink its relationship to human beings and nature. In his book Quantum Mind and Social Science,1 Wendt writes that the social sciences are all based on a fundamental error. Since their early days around 150 years ago, social scientists have taken it for granted that human societies obey the laws of classical physics. This assumption seems reasonable at first glance; after all, we are macroscopic objects just like tables and chairs, so we should also be subject to the same laws. But the same rules don’t apply to our consciousness, or to our social processes. Instead, they are characterized by the principles of quantum physics, such as nonlocality and entanglement.
Game theory is just another example of the current influence of quantum theory. In the classical approach, the strategic interaction between two or more actors (players) is modeled on a situation with defined rules and results—an approach that is particularly popular in economics. Quantum game theory represents a further refinement: among other things, it assumes that humans are inextricably linked to one another, and that our economic systems and our struggle for happiness must thus also be seen as linked to one another. In other words:...
