Things Hidden #10 - Technological Innovation

Greetings from Austin! I welcome the opportunity to bring to you the seventh post of Things Hidden! Episode #10 of the Things Hidden podcast is out now!

You can watch the YouTube by clicking the link here-

The script I wrote for Episode #10 can be found below. This episode is about technological innovation. The first part of the episode looks at the breathtaking pace of innovation humanity has generated over the last few centuries, and the human flourishing that has come with it. The back part of the episode looks at what's coming in the near future and discusses the opportunities and risks that come along with that innovation.

Please feel free to reach out with any questions or comments you might have. I continue to have phone calls with folks who reached out after watching Things Hidden and wanted to have a discussion about faith. I welcome those discussions, regardless of your vantage point.

If you want to follow along on socials too, they’re all linked here - https://linktr.ee/thingshidden

Be well.

- Travis

We ready? Let’s do this.

Welcome to Episode 10 of Things Hidden. Things Hidden is an exploration of the intersection of Faith and six factors that surround faith - Religion; Physics; Evolution; Consciousness; Philosophy; and Technological Innovation. The purpose of Things Hidden is to bring people into a closer relationship with God, and through that process coming into a closer relationship with God myself.

Episode 1 was the intro to Things Hidden. Episodes 2, 3 and 4 covered Faith from a bunch of different perspectives. Episode 5 was about religion. 6 was about Physics. 7 was about evolution. 8 was about consciousness. 9 was about philosophy.

If you haven’t listened to those first nine episodes, I would strongly encourage you to do that before starting this one. We’re still at the very beginning of Things Hidden, and Episode 1 is definitely the best place to start.

Before we get started - do me a favor, if you are so inclined. Smash like and subscribe on this video. It helps Things Hidden get out to more people. Ok. Today we will be discussing Technological Innovation, the last “petal” of Things Hidden. 3+ years ago as I began researching for Things Hidden in earnest, I didn’t have the Things Hidden logo in mind at the onset.

The logo was a natural output of my research as I went along the path of trying to contextualize a belief in a higher power. As I went looking earnestly, I found God in evolution. I found God in physics. I found God in consciousness. And as I was scouring these various areas of study, I found a surprisingly small amount of content that would connect these areas of study back to a belief in a higher power. And that seemed like a big, important gap. And that was the impetus for Things Hidden. And that’s why the logo looks the way it does.

And I see God in technological innovation. I see God in technological innovation in a similar way to seeing God in evolution. In a way, I think of technological innovation as an extension of evolution. Humans evolved to develop a brain that could create technology. There are other animals that can do a bit of this tool usage, but it obviously pales in comparison to the technology that humanity has come up with. And evolution and technological innovation have historically been intertwined - perhaps most famously in humans capturing fire, then using fire to cook food, the cooked food having a much higher net caloric availability, and this increased caloric availability led to early hominids developing much larger brains. Evolution and technological innovation go hand in hand.

Our discussion today will be broken down into two parts - first we will look backwards at technology - we will look at the innovation that has pushed humanity to where it is today, which has been a tremendous journey. And then we will look forward at technological innovation - the innovation we see in our lives currently and the innovation that is coming in the future. I’ll just warn you now, it gets kinda spooky towards the end. But it’s honestly how I feel about the future and I feel called to talk about it here. So just, get ready for that.

The first primary point I want to make about technological innovation is that it has delivered immense abundance for humanity. This is the main reason that I believe technological innovation comes from God - because humanity has received such massive benefits from it historically. And the overwhelming majority of those benefits have come very recently - in the last couple hundred years. And I get the sense God wants us to flourish and technology has brought human flourishing.

Homo sapiens have been around for 200, maybe 300,000 years. And for 99.99% of homo sapiens’ existence, we’ve been faced with staggering scarcity. Wake up every morning and just try to stay alive. Find food. Find shelter. Find clean water. Try not to die before you reproduce. And for nearly that entire time, we weren’t particularly good at staying alive (10-3).

How has humanity managed to live out this incredible chart? The answer is technological innovation. Technological innovation has been THE tool humanity has wielded to combat the scarcity that is inherent to existence on Earth (10-4). 

Technological innovation drives increased life expectancy, increased quality of life and decreased scarcity. When man discovered fire, life got better. When he invented the wheel, life got better. Agriculture. Toilets. Fertilizers. The steam engine. Electricity. Penicillin. All technological innovations that led to increased life expectancy, increased quality of life and decreased scarcity.

Scarcity makes humans kill each other. When humans are scared that they don’t have enough, they get together in groups and go take things from other people outside the group. This leads to war. Civilization has been defined by this tendency. It appears to be deeply rooted in our DNA. But as scarcity has decreased, our tendency to kill each other has also decreased (10-5). It may not feel that way, because we have news and social media and now conflicts like Ukraine and Gaza are essentially livestreamed and that footage is incredibly heavy. But the data is clear. WW1 and WW2 were terrible hiccups of this trend, but since then, we have been killing each other much less in wars. Because scarcity is decreasing and that is due to technological innovation.

Life has been getting much, much better for humanity lately. And it’s been getting better at an accelerating rate. 

(10-8) Extreme poverty went from 94% in 1820 to 8% today.

(10-9) Homicide rates have decreased 30-fold since early civilizations started forming.

(10-10) Life expectancy went from 29 years in 1800 to 73 years today.

(10-11) The child mortality rate went from 43% in 1800 to sub 4% today.

(10-12) Economist Marian Tupy is a proponent of “time prices”, which is the number of hours required to work at the average wage to buy a good or service at the average price. Food that took 100 hours of work to buy in 1900 now takes just 4 hours. We can buy 3.4 times as much stuff for the same amount of work as we could in 1980, and that occurred while the population has more than doubled. 

Inflation-adjusted GDP per capita is one of the best ways to visualize how technological innovation has increased human flourishing over time(10-6). Just sit with that chart for a second. It is stunning. Life was just really really tough forever, and then it has very rapidly become much less tough in the last couple centuries.

The Morris Social Development Index (10-7) is a similar approach to measuring human flourishing, but with different inputs. Stanford professor Ian Morris uses energy capture, social structure organization, information technology and war-making capacity as the four inputs for his index. While there are many assumptions that go into this chart, his assumptions are well-reasoned and he is considered a top domain expert on these topics. Note that this chart is in log scale.

The key takeaway from Morris’ work is that the human condition has changed drastically more in the last century than it had changed from the Ice Age up until a century ago. And if you extrapolate out the current trend, the human condition will increase 5 TIMES more in the coming century than it changed in the prior century. Morris’ work predicts that life as a human 100 years from now will be more different from our lives now, than our lives now are different from the life of a cave man. How crazy is that?

But we do sort of feel that in our lives today, don’t we? Life is accelerating at an accelerating rate. You feel that, right? Technological innovation moves at an exponential pace. And we can understand why that’s the case. There is knowledge accumulation - each technological breakthrough builds on previous breakthroughs. This leads to compound learning. We don’t just add knowledge, we multiply it. We make tool-making tools - technology creates better technology, faster. There are network effects coupled with a drastic increase in population - many more minds communicating much more to solve problems. So technological innovation is accelerating at an accelerating rate.

As a quick aside, this may or may not be a topic you’ve thought deeply about - technological innovation. It was not a topic I thought deeply about for most of my life. I was not passionate about technology for most of my life. I was not a technology investor. But in 2017 at the age of 32 I became enamored with Bitcoin and crypto and I bet my whole career and net worth on Bitcoin and crypto. You can think about Bitcoin as a 1-year bet or 3-year bet. But a bet on Bitcoin is also a 10-20-30 year bet. It’s a bet on a technology gaining adoption that is totally different than what exists today. It’s a bet on the intertwinement of money and technology in a way we’ve never seen before. So over the last 8 years I have been a technology investor and spent a lot of time chewing on the intersection of humanity and technology. And that naturally leads to what we’re about to talk about now. Which is that technological innovation is accelerating at an accelerating rate.      

There are many examples that highlight how true this is. Think about travel. The first vehicle created by humans not powered by animals or the wind was the train, and it took like 300,000ish years to go from no powered vehicles to trains. Then it took about 100 years to go from the first powered vehicle to the first powered flight. It then took another 58 years to go from the first powered flight to the first human in space. It took 8 years from the first human in space to put the first human on the moon.

Think about weapons. It took about 3,000 years to go from copper swords to steel swords. It took about 750 years to go from steel swords to the atomic bomb. 

Think about communication. It took ~5,000 years to go from written language to the printing press. It took 400 years from the printing press to the telegraph. It took 40 years from the telegraph to the telephone. It took 90 years from the telephone to the internet. And it took 15 years from the internet to smartphones putting the internet in everyone's pocket.

Think about computation. It took 5,000 years from the abacus to the mechanical calculator. It took 300 years from the mechanical calculator to the electronic computer. It took 40 years from room-sized computers to personal computers. It took 20 years from PCs to smartphones that were more powerful than supercomputers of the 1980s.

Think about information. Human knowledge doubled every century until 1900. Knowledge doubled every 25 years by 1945. Knowledge doubled every 13 months by 2020. IBM predicts knowledge will double every 12 hours in the immediate future.

Think about human population. It took humanity 200,000 years to reach 1 billion people. It took 123 years to reach 2 billion. It took 33 years to reach 3 billion. And it took 12 years for each billion after that.

So it is undeniable. Life for us humans has been getting much much better and that is happening at an accelerating rate. And all these charts. All of them. Are due to technological innovation. The time scales that we just looked at on all those charts are way too short to be due to evolution. We’re only talking about a handful of generations. Evolution doesn’t move that fast. It’s our culture that did this. Our culture of technological innovation. A truly remarkable feat of human ingenuity.

Which brings us to today, sitting on all these hockey stick growth curves, looking out into the future. Imagining a world 100 years from now, that is more different from our lives today, than a caveman’s life was, from our lives today. What specifically is on the horizon?

Life expectancy will almost certainly skyrocket. There is a term called “Longevity Escape Velocity”. This is the point at which life expectancy increases more than one year for every year that passes. Domain experts estimate this Longevity Escape Velocity will be reached between 2030 and 2050. There is a very legitimate chance that by 2050, dying of “natural causes” will be something approaching optional for those with access to the latest treatments.

This sounds unbelievable. How could this happen? Let’s look at the 2023 leading causes of death in the US (10-13) -

One way to look at this is that being fat probably kills half of all Americans every year, which really is an incredible testament to technological innovation just in itself. 74% of Americans are overweight and 43% are obese. Look at the chart. Heart disease, strokes, diabetes - these are all directly tied to being overweight. Being overweight is also a major risk factor for cancer, Alzheimer’s, liver disease and kidney disease. You add all that up and make some estimates and you can easily get to over half of all deaths every year from being overweight.

Boom. Enter GLP-1’s. Ozembic. WeGovy. Truly a miracle drug. Unthinkable to humanity 50 years ago. Weight is falling off people and the side effects are minimal and mostly mild. You’re seeing unprecedented cardiovascular benefits. So that is already having a significant impact on obesity and will almost certainly see a continued increase in impact. On top of that, GLP-1’s have been shown to significantly reduce cravings for alcohol and drugs. Go back to the pie chart again. Liver disease, cancers, drug overdose, suicide. Alcohol and drugs play a significant role here. Oh, and by the way, you’re scared of needles? They just came out with a pill that has even less side effects than the injection! A miracle of modern science. Could easily end up saving a billion lives.

But technological innovation has more than just GLP’s on deck to combat dying. CRISPR gene editing is set to make a massive impact on dozens of diseases. There are currently over 250 clinical trials ongoing for CRISPR therapies. Blood cancers, Alzheimer’s, autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes. CRISPR will almost certainly come to dominate medicine in the coming years and could easily end up saving a billion lives.

Let’s keep going on the pie graph. How about car accidents? 40,000 deaths a year in the US but 5.1mm injuries per year. Here comes Waymo and Tesla’s RoboTaxi (10-14). How much safer is Waymo than the average US driver? How about a 91% reduction in car crashes that cause serious injuries? 79% reduction in crashes that cause airbag deployment? 93% reduction in pedestrian crashes? The adoption of autonomous driving vehicles is currently skyrocketing and they will become ubiquitous over the next decade, virtually eliminating car wreck deaths and serious injuries.

Lab-grown organic tissues are set to have a significant impact in the coming years. There are currently clinical trials for a spray-on form of lung tissue to combat COPD. Scientists have already successfully implanted lab-grown lungs into pigs. Scientists are already 3D printing functional heart valves and growing heart muscle patches from stem cells.

I could keep going here, but I think by now you get the point. When you look at the leading causes of death, nearly every one is set to be significantly reduced by technological innovation over the coming years and decades. We are quite literally solving dying.

Moving on, we’re certainly going to cover AI in more detail, but first I want to hit on robotics. Think of robotics as the meatspace wrapper for AGI - Artificial General Intelligence. AGI is coming and it is coming soon, and what a great waste of AGI it would be if it were just stuck in the digital world, having to rely on humans to actually execute on actions in the real world.

Like all the other technologies we’re discussing here today, robotics and specifically humanoid robotics, has seen a great acceleration in the last few years and there is every indication to think that acceleration is going to continue in the near future.

Humanoid robots toiled in relative obscurity with limited accomplishments for several decades. But recently because of significant advancements in AI, batteries, motors and sensors, it is now looking like the coming two decades will see massive rollout of these humanoid robots.

The Total Addressable Market is truly enormous with robotics. Approximately HALF of global GDP is human labor. Half. So that’s the market opportunity for robotics companies. You can listen to the leading builders and domain experts in the humanoid robotics space to get a sense of what’s coming. The rest of the 2020s will be the rollout of proof of concepts. By 2030, 250,000 units will be deployed, mostly industrial. By the early 2030s, 1mm units will be shipping annually, mostly for industrial uses. A decade from now, we will see a great acceleration in the deployment of general purpose at-home robots. By 2040, 8mm units will be deployed in the US alone. Every single domain expert sees the eventual number of robots exceeding the number of humans on planet Earth.

So just sit with that for a second. Imagine a world where most everyone has a humanoid robot in their home - doing basically everything for you. They’ll be walking your dog down the street. They’ll be sitting in the back of a Waymo running errands for you. Humanoid robots will be ubiquitous in a couple decades. We are talking about a human experience that is just drastically different from our world today. And it will be here in a decade or two. Not 100 years. Not 50 years. A decade or two.

Which brings us to AI - the mother of all technological innovations. Almost assuredly it will be the most impactful invention in human history. There is a saying that captures the significance of AI - “If humans successfully build AGI, it will be the last machine they ever build”. The implication there is that once humans build AGI, AGI will build everything else going forward, including ASI - Artificial Super Intelligence. And there may be a short period where AGI still needs humans to tell it what to build, but once ASI is built, humans’ ability to direct the ASI to do anything will be too inferior for the ASI to pay much attention.

And it’s worth distinguishing here between AGI and ASI. AGI matches human cognitive abilities across all domains - it can understand, learn, and apply knowledge to any intellectual task that a typical human can perform - from writing poetry to solving math problems to learning new skills. A simple rule of thumb is AGI is as good at nearly every task as any individual human expert is at that task. 

ASI, on the other hand, surpasses the sum of all human intelligence in virtually every field, including creativity, general wisdom, social skills, and scientific thinking. ASI will be able to solve problems and make discoveries that are fundamentally beyond human comprehension. A simple rule of thumb is ASI could solve a mathematics problem humans know the answer to but can’t figure out how to get to the answer.

The key distinction between the two is that AGI equals human intelligence while ASI dramatically exceeds it. And they’re both coming, soon, one after the other. The estimates of timelines for these milestones are actually pretty tightly clustered. Google Founder Eric Schmidt says AGI by 2028-2030. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says AGI in 2026. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says AGI by just after 2030. Former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever says AGI in the early 2030s. Futurist Ray Kurzweil says AGI by 2029. And then the broad consensus is that ASI comes 1-3 years after we get AGI.

And what happens at that point is generally referred to as The Singularity. You’ve probably heard this term before. It’s a memorable one, in a spooky sort of way. The Singularity is the hypothetical moment in the future when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. It primarily centers around AI and AI’s advancement through AGI into ASI. The Singularity represents a “point of no return” where recursive AI self-improvement accelerates and changes happen so rapidly and so inexplicably that humanity’s ability to predict the direction of technological advancement breaks down. The general view is that The Singularity will hit a short time after ASI, because ASI will be uncontrollable by humans. And we’re rocketing towards it. Not 100 years. Not 50 years. Maybe a decade.

Sound spooky? Yeah, it is spooky. I mean this is the part of the episode where it gets weird and it gets scary. This is the worrisome part of technological innovation. I’ve listened to a fair amount of AI safety experts over the last couple years and I listened to more in preparation for this episode. These guys will scare the crap out of you. Especially when you combine it with humanoid robotics. There really is an outcome that is drastically too close for comfort to the storyline of The Terminator.

AI experts have a term for this. It’s called p(doom). Great name, right? p(doom) is shorthand for the probability that AI leads to human extinction or civilizational collapse. Essentially, what’re the odds that AI development "goes really, really badly". p(doom) is a topic of enormous discussion in the AI safety research world. The terrifying thing is how high many of the experts have their p(doom) probabilities set. Sure, some experts say the likelihood of a catastrophic outcome is really low, but pretty much all of those experts are deeply incentivized to say that publicly. Geoffrey Hinton, considered “the Godfather of AI” says p(doom) is 15%. Elon Musk says 20%. The CEO of Anthropic says 25%. Yoshua Bengio, Director of the MILA AI Center, says 50%. Paul Christiano, Head of Research at the US AI Safety Institute says 50%. Dan Hendrycks, Director of the Center for AI Safety says >80%. MIT Professor Max Tegmark >90%. AI Safety Researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky says >95%. AI Safety Researcher Roman Yampolskiy says 99.9%.

You can find all these guys on Youtube talking about how they see AI opportunities and risks going forward. It’s a major rabbit hole. I’ve listened to a fair amount of this content and it is both exciting and terrifying. I mean it when I say that literally no one has a concrete executable plan for addressing p(doom). No one. There are AI safety organizations whose main goal is to slow the development of AGI. But when you listen to domain experts walk through what options there actually are to prevent AGI and then ASI, you see that the game theory leads you to believe that humanity will race towards ASI as quickly as possible. At a simple nation-state geopolitical level, if you think your competition is working towards AGI, you yourself are incentivized to also work on AGI. As quickly as possible. And once AGI is achieved, most experts agree the hop to ASI will be quick - a few years. And once ASI has arrived, all bets are off.

And that’s really what ASI comes down to. By definition, we cannot imagine what happens after ASI is achieved. A simple example of this is “Move 37” - as made famous by the 2016 documentary called AlphaGo - named after Google’s AI that it built to beat the best Go players in the world. You should watch the doc if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s great. As a quick backstory, the game Go has 10^250 times more move combinations than chess. So it’s a much much harder problem for an AI to solve than chess. Google built an AI that could do it though. 

And in a game against the best Go player in the world, AlphaGo played “Move 37” which was totally beyond comprehension for any human player. AlphaGo calculated there was a 1 in 10,000 chance a human would ever play that move. Move 37 was extremely unorthodox to the point of looking obviously stupid. But it wasn’t stupid. The advantages of Move 37 wouldn’t become obvious until 50 moves later in the game. And a human player just can’t connect that many dots. But the AI could and it won the game. And that was a DECADE ago. A decade. Now with that story as context, think about how we can’t predict what ASI is going to do once it’s achieved. And so it seems this will be a headline deal for humanity over the next 15 years.

And this p(doom) concept, you can think about it in the context of evolution. We’ve talked a lot about evolution in prior episodes. 99% of all plants and animals ever have gone extinct. That’s what p(doom) is essentially referring to. 99% of all plants and animals ever eventually ended up with a p(doom) of 100%. And you could argue that many don’t go extinct, they just evolved into a different species. And that’s true. But evolving into a species completely different than you, is a form of p(doom) anyways, right? So betting on a high p(doom) is actually just a matter of timeframe. Over a long enough timeframe, every species either goes extinct or evolves into something totally different. Why would you say this time is different when it comes to humanity?

Consider Neuralink, which is already seeing significant success with 12 total implants so far, all with positive outcomes. Imagine 50 years from now, where a Neuralink on steroids totally transforms our capabilities and becomes mass adopted. Does that mean we’ve evolved into a new form of homo sapien? If humanity creates ASI that “lives” on into the future while homo sapiens eventually die out, was that evolution?

It does make this time quite different because you’re talking about jumping from a carbon-based lifeform - us, to something that is silicon-based - ASI. We’ve never seen any lifeform other than carbon-based lifeforms. Would ASI be a silicon-based lifeform? That would depend on your definition of lifeform, and there are disagreements amongst domain experts about the definition of life. NASA provided a definition for life in the 1990’s. NASA says life is “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”. So consider AGI or ASI from that definition. When you think about ASI controlling millions of humanoid robots, you could assume that ASI would have complete autonomy over its own energy sourcing, self-maintenance, reproduction, and evolution. Under those assumptions, ASI wouldn’t need humans for anything. All of a sudden, ASI starts to look a lot like a silicon-based lifeform.

We’ll come back to p(doom) at the end, but there’s a few more points I want to make first. I want to talk about job disruption from the combined AI and robotics revolutions. Alongside p(doom), this is another headline topic in this area. And it does seem undeniable. When you dig into the details, it’s hard to imagine there isn’t significant job disruption in the coming decades.

Let’s take a similar approach to job displacement that we took with leading causes of death. (10-15) What are the most populous jobs in America?

The first thing to point out on this chart is that the US job market is quite distributed. The top 10 job categories as defined by the BLS only account for ~16% of all jobs. But you can start going category by category, and imagining how each of these categories is going to be displaced over the next decade.

E-commerce is already disrupting retail salespersons. AI chatbots + virtual try-ons add to that displacement. Computer vision will enable “checkout-less” shopping experiences in brick and mortar stores.

Operations managers will see massively reduced headcount. AI can manage 100 processes better than a human can manage 10. Workflow automation. Predictive analytics. Automated monitoring and feedback systems. All of it replaces human operations managers.

Counter workers will see severe displacement over the coming decade. You’re already seeing this in lots of fast food stores. Once you add in robotic food preparation, the human labor requirements will drop further still. Cashiers are in the same bucket as retail and counter workers. More self checkout until machine vision “checkout-less” shopping becomes widely available, which will probably take a decade.

Nurses are probably safer than most professions over the next decade or two, particularly as the population starts to live increasingly longer. Those demographics will likely help support this industry. Robots will probably be mostly ancillary rather than displacive.

Office clerks obviously have a huge problem. Customer service obviously has a huge problem. Waiters and waitresses are safer than most, but if less people have the excess income to go out to eat at places that have waiters, the industry will still see contraction. Elementary school teachers are likely safer than most, because children need the human to human interaction, at least in the next decade or two. Stockers and order fillers are likely in big trouble over a decade-long timeframe. In a decade, when logistics facilities are built, they will be built with very little human headcount required for operations.

So that’s the Top 10 most populous jobs. Let’s dive quickly into a handful of specific industries that will be severely disrupted. Data entry is 2.1mm people and facing massive displacement. Accounting is 1.7mm people and facing massive displacement. Assembly line workers are 1.8mm and facing massive displacement. The broad category of “Drivers”, which encompasses multiple subcategories, is 4.4mm and facing massive displacement. Administrative assistants are 3.6mm and facing massive displacement.

There is actually an acute “white collar” bend to a lot of the most heavily impacted jobs. Junior lawyers and legal assistants. Radiologists. Financial analysts. Software developers. These are jobs that earn at least twice and sometimes 10x the median national income. And they appear to be some of the most at risk of displacement.

When you add it all up, you can pretty conservatively get to 25% structural unemployment by 2035. So then you start to imagine what that would look like, and what the road to get to 25% structural unemployment would look like over the next decade. This is a macroeconomics question and I’ve spent my entire career investing with a macroeconomic perspective, so this is more in my wheelhouse than a lot of the topics I’ve covered on Things Hidden.

I think deflation over the next decade is likely. The prices of goods and services should fall and probably fall significantly. I struggle to see how that’s not the case. This will go in tandem with very low or negative interest rates. Deflation and low interest rates always go together. It’s hard to say what GDP will do because I think the concept of GDP is going to start falling apart over the next decade. You could see a scenario where GDP doubles while median income is cut in half. You could have the highest GDP growth in US history concurrent with the worst unemployment crisis in US history.

Over the next decade, we will likely see the basic building blocks of economics start to fall apart. Time, labor and capital. Time. Labor. And capital. The relationship between these three inputs are at the core of how economics works. Now imagine a robot, hooked up to AGI, with a solar panel on its head. The robot can do almost any sort of work. The robot works 24/7 for free. Now imagine 10 million of these robots. 100 million. The basic building blocks of time, labor and capital start to unravel. I think we will see this over the next decade.

The wealth concentration will be stunning. It’s already currently the worst in US history but it will get much much worse over the next decade. I cannot see how that’s not the case. It’s inherent in the nature of the value created by the technological innovation and the value accrued by the companies that provide that innovation. The top 1% in the US currently hold 35% of all wealth. We could easily see the top 1% holding 70% of all wealth by 2035. In 2035 the bottom 50% of Americans will likely have a combined negative net worth.

This level of unemployment coupled with this level of wealth concentration will cause significant societal unrest. This seems virtually assured to me. This will almost certainly require new types of taxes on the wealthiest companies and individuals to provide some form of UBI to at least half of all Americans. This interplay between societal unrest and transfer payments via taxation from the top 1% to the bottom 50% will be a defining feature of society over the next decade and beyond. This seems very likely to me.There is a famous saying from Roman poet Juvenal at the beginning of the 2nd century AD - “Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt”. The point being, hand out free food and provide lavish, distracting entertainment, and the masses will be placated. It is worth mentioning that at the time of that quote, the Roman empire had about the same level of wealth inequality that the US has currently. So that’s, uhh, interesting.

This interplay between wealth inequality and societal unrest will almost certainly play out on the political stage as well. More outright socialist political candidates will likely gain significant traction, as demands from the bottom 90% to tax the top 10% grow increasingly louder. This will be a headline issue for both Republicans and Democrats, and both parties seem enormously ill-suited to deal with these issues currently. They will be forced to deal with them over the next decade. We will likely get a taste of this very soon with an outright socialist New York City mayor.

All of this will likely add up to a purpose crisis. You’re already seeing the beginnings of this with Gen Z and Gen Alpha. America will see a crisis in purpose, a crisis in meaning. The collective psychological damage that comes along with 25% structural unemployment is significant. Having a stable job. Earning a living to provide for your family. These are institutions that have been central parts of civilization for thousands of years. And those institutions are set to be significantly disrupted at an unprecedented pace.

As I was preparing for and writing this episode, I was reminded of why Technological Innovation was its own petal for Things Hidden. Because increasingly over the last several years, I have come to realize that technology is going to radically change the human experience in the coming years. It used to feel far away. A century away. Many decades away. With the advancements in AI and robotics that we’ve seen in the last few years and what’s on the immediate horizon, that change is not far away anymore. It’s knocking at our door.

Paradoxically, the term “abundance” gets thrown around just as much as the term p(doom). Experts talk about “radical abundance”, “exponential abundance” and the “post-scarcity economy”. We are developing technology to cure dying while also developing technology to extinguish the majority of human labor. There is a path through all this that leads to utopia. Of course there will be friction and growing pains as we innovate away the concept of work. But the path to utopia is available for humanity. I can see it. There are risks to that path. We talked about the AI risk a lot. It’s hard to accurately quantify but it’s very real. There are also war risks. Existential war risks. Technological innovation applies to weapons as well. Nuclear weapons. Bioweapons. You could see the US ASI fight a war with the China ASI. Seriously.

Finally, we’ve gone this entire discussion and barely mentioned God. I want to talk about God in the context of simulation theory and p(doom). We’ve already talked a lot about simulation theory in prior episodes. I don’t know about you, but this discussion today makes simulation theory make even more sense to me. If our future descendants are running ancestor simulations, this particular period in human history we find ourselves in seems like a prime candidate for running simulations. What is the nature of the Creator of this simulation we’re in?

As a reminder, EVERY MAJOR WORLD RELIGION says we’re in a simulation. They may not use that exact language, because that language wasn’t around back then, but it amounts to the same thing - religions all agree that we do not exist in base reality. And every major world religion thinks different things about how the ending of this simulation is going to go. Basically, every religion opines on p(doom). Christianity, Judaism and Islam all describe a heaven scenario; or a heaven and a hell scenario. Hinduism and Buddhism describe an eternal cyclical process of creation and destruction. In any case, religion provides some specifics about how p(doom) might materialize. Making a call on p(doom) is in part making a call on how the simulation ends.

There’s a few points, or maybe options, that I want to present about how God fits into all this. As I’ve said before, I won’t pretend to have the answers. Things Hidden has never been about “knowing”. It seems to me that we have an array of potential possibilities that lie in front of us in the not-too-distant future. And a lot of it can be brought back to God’s causality in this world. Does God move in this world? If so, how, why, and when?

As a quick aside, I will say that the Bible is not clear on this. Revelation, the last book of the Bible, talks about the end of the world a lot. But it is confusing and there is wide disagreement on how literally the author of Revelation meant for it to be taken. There are also questions about the legitimacy of Revelation as Biblical canon. When you look at the rest of the Bible outside of Revelation for descriptions about the end of the world, it is confusing. I could easily do a two hour episode just on this topic, and I might someday. But for now, suffice it to say, the Bible is not clear on how the world will end.

OK back to the last couple points I want to make. We’ve talked about the potential for ASI to replace humanity. Or perhaps we become cyborgs with ASI implanted in our brains. We’ve talked about achieving radical abundance, or maybe we blow ourselves up. Which of these outcomes will come to fruition would be easier to predict if we had a sense of how much God is driving this boat of existence we’re all on. Will God intervene to make sure we achieve radical abundance and don’t blow ourselves up? Does God want us to create ASI, the first ever silicon-based lifeform, and then die out, like 99% of all the animals that have ever lived? Part of this analysis is making a call on the point of this simulation we’re in. Will God be hands off, and if humanity makes enough bad decisions then we die out, or 99% of the population dies out and we effectively have to start over again like some kind of Mad Max movie?

What I can say, is that the inverse of p(doom) is p(love). It sure feels like this particular part of the simulation we’re in is testing humanity. A big test. Will we choose love or power? WIll we choose service or domination? Will we choose cooperation or competition? Will we remember that we are co-creators WITH God, or will we try to become God ourselves?

p(doom) is p(pride). It’s p(selfishness). We have the receipts to know how that plays out in history. And we have the receipts to know how p(love) plays out. When we choose cooperation. When we choose love. When we choose to act as if God exists. When we choose to be accountable to something greater than ourselves - we flourish. The receipts are clear. Christianity has produced more human flourishing than any other belief system in human history precisely because it puts self-sacrificial love at the center.

And so God leaves it up to us. As it seems like he mostly always has. The story of Noah and the ark and the great flood is a story about humanity acting so selfishly that they nearly go extinct. And I’ve always felt this in my own life. I have free will. A hundred times a day I can choose to do the right thing. The moral thing. The selfless thing. The agape thing. And I can reap what that sews. Or I can choose to do the wrong thing. The immoral thing. The selfish thing. And I can reap what THAT sews. This framework applies at the humanity scale as well. And now, with technological innovation, it appears the stakes for those choices are the highest they’ve ever been.

So we must choose the manner in which we implement this technological innovation. Choose love. Choose service. Choose God. Not because we're afraid of some distant alternate dimension hell, but because if we don’t, we’ll bring hell right to our front door. On this Earth. Soon.

And choosing love. Choosing service. Choosing God. We can see that's the only path that's ever actually worked. It’s the path that leads to life, not death. To abundance, not scarcity. To transcendence, not replacement.

There’s one other way I want to frame this potentially existential climax to the simulation that we seem to find ourselves in. And that is from the perspective of emergence. We’ve talked a lot about emergence in prior episodes. The universe emerged from nothing in the Big Bang. Complexity emerges from simplicity through evolutionary natural selection. Consciousness is subjective experience emerging from matter. Each time, something radically new came into existence that couldn’t be predicted from the prior state alone.

Now it appears we are approaching another emergence event and it might be as significant as the ones I just mentioned. And just like those prior emergence events, we can’t predict exactly how it’s going to play out. But we can look at the patterns.God seems to work through emergence. Emergence seems to be crucial to how this universe works. And from our vantage point, emergence looks like it gets set up through fine tuning. The universe ended up finely-tuned for stars and planets. Chemistry ended up finely-tuning for life. Brains finely-tuned for consciousness. And now - humanity finely-tuned for technological transcendence.

Importantly, these emergent events come with risks. Stars blow up into supernovas and then collapse into black holes. Evolution produces predators and parasites. Consciousness enables suffering. And now technological innovation enables both radical abundance AND existential catastrophe. Emergence events are moments of maximum freedom, maximum potential and maximum danger. And God doesn’t prevent the danger, because that would eliminate the freedom. And so what we’re all feeling right now. That acceleration I laid out earlier. It feels that way because we are approaching an emergence event. And in this particular emergence event, p(doom) is the inverse of p(love). That is the choice that we as humanity are faced with.

And so that is my aim with Things Hidden. To illuminate this emergence. To help frame this emergence in a way that hopefully pushes humanity towards the optimal outcome. I’m betting that God exists. I’m betting that God is good. And I’m betting that God has structured reality in a way where love wins - if we choose it. The receipts support that bet. The science supports that bet. And the patterns support that bet. We just have to choose it. Choose love. I have to choose it. You have to choose it. The executives of the AI and robotics companies have to choose it. And humanity has to choose it.

Ok. That’s it. We covered a lot here today. This was the last of the introductory episodes of Things Hidden. We did an intro episode, three episodes on Faith, the center of Things Hidden. And one episode for each of the petals of Things Hidden. I wrote approximately 70,000 words for these ten episodes. That’s about a book’s worth of writing. It was a tremendously rewarding experience for me personally. Things Hidden has changed my life. I hope you feel the same way too.

The next episode will start the second phase of Things Hidden. We will be reviewing and discussing other people’s work that has been impactful for me on my journey so far. If you enjoyed this, hit like and subscribe. If you want to sign up for the blog, it’s in the description. If you’re looking for the online community, it’s coming soon. If you know someone that would be interested in Things Hidden, send this to them. I really appreciate your time, and I wish you the best.