What on Earth do we do with all these people?
Right now there are 7.8 billion people on the planet, increasing at 1% a year, which means it will increase by another 2 billion in 30 years.
We have about 1.4 billion people apiece in China and India, and 330 million in the USA.
Almost every problem on Earth right now is made worse by the rapid growth of population, which continues to accelerate.
The truly bad news is that we have more people than we know what to do with, by a substantial margin, and we probably have more people than the planet will sustain right now, certainly true if they all want to live the way Americans live and burn up resources at that rate.
Aside from environmental damage, one result is huge social unrest, because there appears to be no way countries can employ all these people.
On top of that, artificial intelligence and robotics is steadily growing more capable and replacing humans with machines, so we need even fewer people to keep things running.
In the USA, many of the 75 million people who voted for Donald Trump were either unemployed, or about to become unemployed, and in any case felt neglected, at risk in many ways of being left behind by society or replaced by hordes of immigrants or both.
As one reader pointed out in a NY Times piece today on "unemployment benefits" due to Covid-19 pandemic in the US, most people are not knowledge workers and are not likely to be retrained as engineers or scientists.
So, again, the question is, what do we do with all these people?
Are they doomed to live miserable lives being ever larger burdens on a smaller fraction with jobs until the system crashes under its own weight? By some estimates we are not that many years from such a situation.
To answer that question we might rephrase it slightly to: What are people good for? Is there some factor or issue or constraint which, if solved, would turn 8 billion people from net drains on the planet to net resources, changing the picture from one of growing desperation to one of astounding wealth?
Since machines can already do the actual heavy lifting jobs for society, we can probably narrow our search to: What knowledge-based activity can put 8 billion people to good use?
We know that we have on the planet many problems in how to deal with various crises, as well as problems agreeing on what crises are more important than others.
So again, rephrasing and recognizing that we do have both Google and a world-wide web and that most people have, or conceivably could have smart-phones or devices to connect them to that web, we get to:
What would it take to make the 8 billion of us, connected to each other via the web, into a massively powerful problem-solving machine?
Perhaps one way to approach that problem is to look at a simpler microscale problem -- How can we get N-people working together to be even smarter if we added one more person, for any value of N?
Right now, we seem to hit the worst of "committee" behavior and a consequent drop in net intelligence of decision-making groups with N around something like 10 to maybe a max of 100. There are very few ways we can fruitfully use 1000 people on any given problem and end up with better solutions than 100 people working together would produce.
So - what's the rate-limiting factor here? Maybe some analogies will reveal patterns or insights.
Today's supercomputers for example use tens of thousands if not millions of smaller computers to synthesize effectively a single huge "super" computer. Can we do something like that with people? Or if not why not?
The human brain uses 100 billion neurons, working together, to solve problems vastly more complex than any single neuron could possibly encompass let alone solve. I'll assert without proof that a human being with 100 billion neurons inside their brain surely has at least the capability of a single neuron, so, theoretically, not discussing how exactly, 100 billion people might, if acting the way neurons act together, somehow synthesize an emergent meta-brain or meta-intelligence.
Is that far fetched? Or is that reasonable? Are we not "there" yet because we don't interconnect well or enough, or because we have too few humans connected to social media, or is there some other factor in the way of collective brilliance?
Because if we could multiply our collective wisdom the the same extent that neurons multiply up to a brain, we would surely be able to solve interstellar travel and spread out to other planets ( if we then wanted to ) and reduce our overloading of Earth.
Or, are we creeping up on this emergent meta-Brain situation without even realizing it, just as, probably no individual neuron in our brain really can imagine (?) what an entire brain is or can do? Despite our obvious battles in social media, is there some axis or dimension along which we keep stumbling to better and better modes of interaction?
Surely, appealing to greed now, if there were some missing app, something Thomas Edison would refer to as the "smallest missing piece" -- as the light-bulb was to the electric power industry he wanted to create -- if there were such an app it would surely be a 'killer-app', a "unicorn", something worth over a $trillion to the inventor(s) who could both get rich and save humanity and Earth -- shades of Total Recall.
So modestly approaching that problem can we somehow make a map or diagram of the situation such that the SHAPE of of the missing element becomes clear or even obvious? What function is missing in what larger almost-complete set of functions that together would span this problem?
I'm thinking here that, if we knew the specs, if we knew what this missing component needed to DO, we could then relatively easily figure out HOW to do that. I'm exploring the idea that the real stumbling block problem before us right now is figuring out the specs.
Do we need to talk faster? Do we need to all use the same language? Do we need a better or different language?
Actually, if we sketch out 8 billion interconnected people, we have in the middle a huge network of the world-wide web, and at the end of each branch we have a dyadic pair --- a smart-phone that acts, Janus like, on the one hand connecting to the world in WWW-speak, and on the other hand, connecting to that particularly human being in that-persons-native-speak.
I use awkward wording on purpose here. We have some hypothesized set of tasks that need the dyad pair ( phone plus person ) to carry out, that needs to be divided up between stuff the phone does and stuff the person does.
In electronics, there is a concept of "impedance matching" where we insert a "transformer" between a component with its native impedance or resistance to a circuit with a preferred resistance and by tweaking the transformer we match up the two so that the circuit "sees" its desired load, being as it were faked out by the transformer. If the load is too heavy, the circuit can't budge it; if the load is too light, the circuit can't transmit much power to it -- imaging trying to convey 5 horsepower to a feather, for example. There is a "right" resistance that maximizes the effective delivery of power, a Goldilocks level, and the matching-transformer makes the end component not have to change itself, but makes it appear to the circuit too have exactly that level of resistance.
So maybe, our problem is that the native resistance ( in some meaning of the word ) of a human is not well matched to the optimum resistance the overall meta-brain wants to "see", and similarly on the other side of the match, the 'resistance' or "receptivity" of the web needs to be matched better to values that encourage and draw out and receive "pushes" from the individual.
That's just one way we might try to find analogous human and social factors to align with.
Or maybe we need to ponder more fully how a brain operates. Often the brain is modeled as a network of neurons but that's not actually true -- the brain is a network of neurons immersed in a responsive chemical soup.
The soup part is generally treated as noise. Maybe it's not noise. Maybe it's an important component that is what makes the whole thing work!
Just as with humans interacting, we have tended to model communication as the words or text-based, language-based interaction and until recent decades, considered the emotional context and body language, etc. as noise, which we sought to reduce to zero in a 'perfectly rational conversation" that didn't evoke strong emotions.
Possibly that's a mistake. Possibly the emotional 'soup' in which the words are exchanged is as important as, or more important than the words.
Or maybe "phase" matters. After all there are THREE not TWO signal encoding modes -- Amplitude modulation ( AM ), Frequency modulation ( FM) and Phase Modulation (PM). The first two are used in radios but not the third in which the meaning of a signal changes if the 'same' signal arrives a microsecond sooner or two microseconds later. We know that, again by analogy, when creating "aperture synthesis" with an array of discrete radio antennas, it is critical to capture the phase information, not just the Amplitude information, or emergent super-resolution is impossible.
We know on a large scale for humans that an answer to a question of "yes!" has a very different torque or meaning to it than an answer of "...yes" where the difference is purely the timing of the response. We blip that as noise on most exams but it matters for human communication. Maybe it matters for neurons and maybe it matters a lot. ( Actually it's strange that we don't measure time-to-answer on most computerized exams when assessing comprehension of a subject. An instant confident "yes" is quite different from a "um.... yes". Why do we discard that information now that we can capture it with computerized testing when we are already using "adaptive question sequencing" to try to deduce not just how much people know but how well they know it ? )
So maybe the hand-held smart-phone impedance matching transformer needs to subtly be shifting the phase of each individuals communication, especially on a global scale with a speed of light limit, so that it becomes less chaotic and more coherent? After all the only difference between room quality light and a cutting laser is phase synchronization of the individual photons and achieving and sustaining "phase-lock".
And while Generation Z may be used to everything being digital, once upon a time in electronics and all the time in the brain, these effects are analog.
Does that matter? It might. Massively parallel analog signal networks may be able to achieve in real-time emergent behaviors that digital signal networks cannot. Until we understand fully how human brains operate, we can't rule that out.
And, perhaps, in fact it is our hope for mankind. Possibly interconnected emotion-laden analog communications between human beings is capable of "computing" emergent behaviors that networks of silicon-based emotionless computers and AI devices cannot.
It's a thought. It gets back to the original question -- What are people good for ( that computers are not?) Maybe what we considered bugs ( human emotions and empathy ) are in fact features we can exploit.
Whether its an alien artifact or a property of nature or living things, biological swarms such as termites and slime-mold and monarch butterflies seem capable of somehow plugging into and utilizing emergent intelligence far beyond what any individual agent can deliver.
( For that matter, noting that human beings have a trillion cells but tracing backwards in time they once were all just "one" ancestor cell, viral swarms of a billion Covid-19 bits all of which derived from a single one and may in fact still be connected to it via space-crossing quantum entangling comes to mind. How "intelligent" is such a swarm and what problems can it detect and solve that we had never realized it could, and if it uses that process can we disrupt it and thereby defeat it? )
Again, it's worth pondering. This is a central research question that deserves a place at the table.
