Technology-driven change won’t stop with automation. In as little as a decade Machine Intelligence could surpass humans. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not talking about sentient MI, the mechanisms that create sentience are not understood (if indeed those processes are mechanistic). I thought for over three decades that sentience was the bulwark against MI exceeding humans. I now no longer think that (even though I wish it) because it is becoming increasingly clear that sentience is not necessary for MI to match human-level processing.



Parking the long term question that MI, sentient or not, poses to humanity (existential threat), I can see upcoming a period of about two decades, where about a tenth of humanity (the ones still with jobs!) will utilise MI to cause an absolute explosion of creative output in every conceivable field (and in many fields not yet conceived) - man and machine in tandem. That will improve and "upscale" both humans and the MI that we create. But humans are stuck in biological timescales – and MI operates in electronic ones, many orders of magnitude faster. So at the end of that, MI on it’s own will be making better decisions in any field without humans – human input will add nothing.



What then for humans?



Postscript:

MI therafter keeps going past us, receding into the horizon. This is notwithstanding that, for a while at least, humanity will attempt to "keep up" through self-engineered enhancements to ourselves, both genetic and tech augmentation. But will this work long term? If you strap a jet-engine to the roof of your Ford Focus, such a contraption will perhaps zoom around for a bit, but it might end up about as stable a something constructed by Wile-E-Coyote.