31. Does optimal wellbeing require merging with AI?

Hi friends,

Welcome to the thirty-first dispatch of How Humans Flourish, a research-informed newsletter on how humans thrive.

Over the last few months, I’ve been having the most fun and spirited conversations with strangers I meet while getting my nails done or while waiting in line at the grocery store. In general, I love hearing the different thoughts, insights, and conspiracy theories people have about any number of things…but, I especially love hearing what people think about technology and the future. 

Lately, my waiting-in-line question is pretty simple: is AI scary or cool?

My nail tech says she’s absolutely not messing with anything AI– it’s just too…smart. Tim, who drives an Uber at night so he can produce beats during the day, says he loves all things AI and even has an AI girlfriend he flirts with every once in a while. 

I’m always intrigued by what feels normal (i.e. having your Oura Ring provide real time information on your sleep habits) versus what feels intrusive (i.e. a robot nurse taking your blood). 

This is why to kickstart our book club this month, we’re jumping deep into techland by reading futurist and technologist Ray Kurzwell’s new book, The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge With AI. In it, Ray spends quite a bit of time sharing his prediction on what health and wellbeing will look like in 30 years and I can’t wait to hear your feedback.

When I think of technology futurism, I immediately remember my first day at grad school at the London School of Economics. I had spent the previous four years working in east Africa, and felt I had an immense understanding on a hot topic at the time– the digital divide between the Global South and the Global North.

The digital divide refers to the gap between regions or countries with access to technology, the internet, and digital literacy and those who do not. And on my first day at school, I felt fortunate that I’d been able to see a broad swathe of experiences–from refugee camp internet cafes to the ingenuity of charging smartphones on small solar panel pads when electricity went out. 

But, nothing really prepared me for that first day. 

I was 24 hours fresh off the plane and sitting in orientation. I listened intently as one of the invited guests–a futurist himself–stood up and explained that if any of us had PhD aspirations, we’d be doing ourselves a favor by buying a ticket to the Bahamas and relaxing on the beach for the next four years. 

He quickly explained, computing power was accelerating at such an exponential rate, in four years there’d be an algorithm to solve whatever statistics problem we’d have spent the last four years working on. Might as well go enjoy life and check back in when the technology could solve the problem in seconds.  

In Ray’s words, in 1959, the “DEC PDP-1 computer could carry out about 100,000 operations per second. By 2023 a Google Cloud A3 virtual machine could carry out roughly 26,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second. One dollar now buys around 1.6 trillion times as much computing power as it did when the GPS was developed. Problems that would take tens of thousands of years with 1959 technology now take only minutes on retail computing hardware.”(Kurzwell, pg 15-16 - Kindle)

When I first heard this futurist, it made me excited…and sad. The possibilities were obviously mind-bending, but I knew where I’d just come from–if there was already a digital divide, would exponential computing power lead to exponential inequity? 

Today, my answer may surprise you. 

There is no doubt that the next 30 years of technological innovation will lead to immense disruption to how we think and live, but it will also open the door to wellbeing opportunities for billions of us unlike we’ve ever seen.

I’m excited to dig into Ray’s vision of the future, as well as, his serious warnings for all of us who care about our shared humanity.

Until next week, friends.

With gratitude,