Think Tank Report Warns of Metaverse's Negative Role in Politics

Washington, D.C. - A recent report by the ApFi think tank has revealed a concerning scenario regarding the future of politics. According to the report, a wild card scenario involving the emergence of the metaverse - a technology that enables the creation of highly realistic virtual reality experiences - could have a negative impact on social cohesion and political engagement.

The report indicates that the metaverse has the potential to create emotionally compelling virtual reality experiences that could lead to a decline in social cohesion and a rise in apathy towards politics and social issues. This scenario could be a critical uncertainty and might even lead to the collapse of liberal democracy or at least a significant decrease in political participation.

"The potential impact of the metaverse on American politics is a cause for concern," suggests the ApFi report. "While the emerging technology has the potential to offer many benefits, it also presents significant risks to our social fabric and democratic institutions."

The report urges policymakers, technologists, and the general public to carefully consider the impact of the metaverse on politics and society. It calls for a collaborative effort to identify ways to mitigate the negative impact of the technology while leveraging its potential benefits.

"The future of American politics is at stake, and we must take a proactive approach to ensure that the metaverse does not become a force that undermines our democracy and social cohesion," added the ApFi think tank.

The ApFi report serves as a wake-up call for all those who care about the future of politics and society. It is a reminder that the choices we make today will have a significant impact on the world we leave to future generations.

To read the full report, please visit https://www.apfi.us/.

About ApFi Think Tank:

ApFi is a leading futures & foresight think tank that conducts research and analysis on critical issues affecting the planetary future of the world. Its mission is to provide policymakers, thought leaders, and the general public with insights and recommendations that can help shape a better future for all.

The AI Revolution: Challenges, Consequences, and the Quest for Spontaneity

The rise of AI has brought about significant changes to society and the economy, but it has also presented challenges. One key challenge is the loss of identity and widespread nihilism among professionals who have invested a lot of time and effort to learn something tough, only to find that AI can do a far better job than them.

The deployment of AI technologies may lead to unintended consequences such as displacement of workers and exacerbation of social inequality, creating a systemic loop difficult to break. The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few super-rich individuals could create tension and conflict within and between societies, and the psychological toll of the AI revolution might lead to an increased demand for mental health services.

Breaking this loop requires a coordinated effort by policymakers, business leaders, and mental health professionals to address the root causes of the systemic challenges posed by the AI revolution.

Moving forward, the next technical challenge of AI development is not about creating God-like AI but rather to develop animal-like AI and ultimately to achieve spontaneity. Achieving spontaneity will involve advances in various areas of research and development.

Here are some small and big steps that can help AI become more spontaneous: 

1. Improving unsupervised learning: Current AI models rely heavily on large amounts of labeled data for training. Developing methods for unsupervised learning can enable AI systems to learn from raw data without explicit labels, making them more adaptable and spontaneous. 

2. Transfer learning and multitask learning: Enhancing AI models' ability to transfer knowledge from one domain to another and to perform multiple tasks simultaneously will help them act more spontaneously in diverse situations. 

3. Incorporating common sense reasoning: Current AI models often lack an understanding of basic common sense knowledge. Developing methods to incorporate common sense knowledge and reasoning into AI systems can make them more spontaneous in their responses and actions. 

4. Developing emotional intelligence: For AI to become spontaneous, it should be able to understand and respond to human emotions effectively. Research on emotional intelligence in AI will be crucial in achieving this goal. 

5. Embodied AI: AI models that can interact with the world through sensory input and physical actions can learn from their environment and develop spontaneous behavior. Research in robotics, computer vision, and natural language processing will contribute to this area. 

6. Reinforcement learning: Improving reinforcement learning techniques can help AI systems learn from trial and error and adapt their behavior to achieve specific goals, contributing to spontaneity. 

7. Neuro-symbolic AI: Integrating neural networks with symbolic reasoning systems can lead to AI models that can reason and learn in a more human-like manner, potentially enabling more spontaneous behavior. 

8. Meta-learning and self-improvement: Developing AI models that can learn how to learn and improve themselves over time will lead to more spontaneous and adaptable systems. 

9. Explainable AI: As AI systems become more spontaneous, it will be crucial to ensure they can explain their reasoning and decisions to humans. Research in explainable AI will help bridge this gap. 

10. Ethics and safety: As AI becomes more spontaneous, it will be essential to ensure that its actions align with human values and ethical considerations. Developing guidelines and safety measures for AI systems will be a critical step in this direction.

While progress in these areas is not exhaustive, it will help pave the way for AI systems that can interact with humans and their environment more naturally and adaptively.

Futures of Work

By Alex Shenderov, PhD

Member of the ApFi Scientific Council 

There are several key trends that appear likely to shape the way we work in the coming decades. One of these trends is superabundance: it takes less and less effort to meet more and more exotic human needs, not to mention basic ones. As a result, more resources, most importantly human talent, are freed up. This could be a possibility to do more, or to work less, or both.

Some focus on the “work less” option and suggest that with superabundance, human work could become unnecessary, and humans useless. The most important question in twenty-first-century economics, they believe, is what to do with all the people becoming superfluous from technological unemployment. One possibility is the adoption of a universal basic income (UBI) and filling everyone’s time on a 100% volunteer/hobbyist basis. Another possibility is finding new uses for specifically human labor, such as settling the universe while taking care of our Earth.

The choice between these scenarios will have profound effects on human health and well-being. Work is that gives workers other benefits besides earning a living, such as social contacts and mental and/or physical exercise. Reduced labor demand is known to lead to psychological and cultural breakdown and – importantly - fertility declines. Continued social engagement in the form of work appears to be crucial for maintaining social cohesion and promoting human flourishing.

The distinction between work and volunteerism seems to be the level of accountability. An elective activity is something that, when things get hard, you can quit without compromising your social standing. At work, you can't do that. Accordingly, the resources that society entrusts workers (in exchange for accountability for spending those resources) are usually far in excess of those available to activists/hobbyists.

Machines increasingly replace humans in occupations meeting the current needs of society. Hence more resources, including human talent, are freed up to convert some elective activities into work - if the society chooses to assign those activities sufficient priority so that allocating serious resources is justified. However, society appears to be having trouble funding socially important work, with eccentric billionaires (occasionally and haphazardly) picking up the slack.

As a side note, rearranging social priorities to reallocate resources at a relevant time scale strains the agility of democracies, long-term foresight of markets, and stereoscopic vision of autocracies and eccentric billionaires. New, Internet-enabled forms of governance may be relevant here.

The fundamental question here is, what do we need ourselves for? Some believe, openly or otherwise, that, increasingly, we just don’t. As long as our ambitions are parochial and pastoralist, this appears to be the only logical choice.

You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet, neo-Malthusians insist - so (they say) we need to go back to the happy times when people were few, and their days (neo-Malthusians believe, despite ample evidence to the contrary) were spent happily dancing barefoot in dewy grass. De-growth, they say, will save the planet. Research, however, shows de-growth to be a death spiral for human civilization that will lead to an empty planet. The same research shows that a stagnant but stable (“sustainable”) pastoralist society is a utopian delusion: inherent feedback loops will send it either forth to the stars, or back to the caves.

The neo-Malthusian supposition that our growth is resource-limited can be instantly cured by the simple exercise of going outside on a clear night and looking up. The zero-sum-game delusion makes no sense when we have hard time finding use for ourselves. The instant we shake its spell, the demand for human labor shoots up. The 58.5 man-hours humans spent exploring the Moon required 5.2 billion man-hours of work down here on Earth. Sure, some of that Earth-bound labor could now be performed by robots; but that would mean more humans, not fewer, can focus on exploring new worlds. And that’s where we outshine robots every day and twice on Sunday: we are the ones that make irrational decisions in an alien environment. In the adaptation department, we the slightly irrational humans outperform the pre-programmed robots the way Internet outperforms carrier pigeons. The one trained human geologist that visited the Moon, accomplished more in a few hours walking around there than preprogrammed robots without, ahem, adult supervision, managed to do in decades. That’s where the future of human labor is – if we choose to have the ambition to settle space.

Why should we? According to humanist view, an ambitious civilization climbing the Kardashev scale to the stars is its home biosphere’s evolutionary adaptation. Space is a shooting gallery, and every life-bearing planet will one day be sterilized one way or another. The only way a biosphere can immortalize itself is to evolve a civilization that can protect it from global catastrophes - and/or plant its copies elsewhere. With this as a long-term goal, humans are unlikely to become uselessness any time soon, - if ever.

In conclusion, the future of work is likely to be shaped by superabundance. Whether or not human work, - and, by extension, continued existence of humans, - serves any useful purpose will not be determined solely by the ability of our machines to excel at tasks we have already invented for them (and invented them for). It will also depend on humans choosing what “useful purpose” stands for.


References:

Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, by Marian L. Tupy, Gale L. Pooley, and George Gilder

World Without Work, by Daniel Susskind

AI will create 'useless class' of human, predicts bestselling historian, by Guardian

Homo Exploratoris: Is Humanity an Apprentice God?, by Alex Shenderov

A World Without Work, by Derek Thompson

Short- and long-term effects of unemployment on fertility, by Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt

30+ Eye-Opening Volunteering Statistics for 2022, by Barry Elad

The NOAA Marine Debris Program

The Ocean Cleanup receives $25 million

Debunked: A quote by Yuval Noah Harari that technology will 'replace people' is missing context