It’s Either Wealth Equality or Total Oligarchy In A World of Mindful Robots

The next stage of capitalism is being determined by the rise of silicon minds.

Silicon minds are the stage above AI, and describe a computer capable of replicating human-level thought.

They will direct the robots who do all the work; there will be no jobs that provide wages for humans.

In a society like this, one of two outcomes is possible:

Either the wealthy class owns all the machines and thereby sweeps up all the profits; or

Wealth is re-distributed evenly, so consumers have money to spend on the goods produced.

Option one is not viable, because the wealthy will end up with no buyers. No one will be earning money.

Option two is society where the wealth is shared with you, in order that the goods produced by machinery have purchasers.

No other trajectories play out in the long march of machine intelligence.

Machine intelligence has been building to this moment for a long time. A recent red flag marker was passed on March 9, 2016, when humanity watched as a human was beaten in an open-minded game by a self-taught thinking machine.

In that game the world’s second-highest ranking professional AlphaGo player, Lee Sedol, squared off against AlphaGo, a computer program created by Google’s DeepMind Company. He lost four games to zero. It was a staggering upset.

What made it special is that AlphaGo’s rules are learned and not designed. To master the open thinking required to beat a human, the machine had to use neural networks to build on data that it acquired, thus creating a ‘thinking’ learning machine. AlphaGo detected patterns, and created plays of such singular beauty that a commentator said of one move: “It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move. So beautiful.”

Which brings us to a notion that used to seem bat-spit crazy back in the day.

I have been sitting on this whim for thirty years, because it sounded like one of the science fiction books I consumed as a kid.

People who have not been warped by mega-doses of science fiction, like to think the…