Again, I think the biggest question in maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people?
The problem is more boredom and how what to do with them and how will they find some sense of meaning in life, when they are basically meaningless, worthless? (Postwall women?)
My best guess, at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for [most]. It’s already happening. Under different titles, different headings, you see more and more people spending more and more time or solving their inner problems with the drugs and computer games, both legal drugs and illegal drugs.
You look at Japan today, Japan is maybe 20 years ahead of the world in everything. And you see all these new social phenomena of people having relationships with virtual; virtual spouses and you have people who never leave the house and just live through computers. (Women replaced with "virtual spouses" and Sexbots?)
What we are talking about now is like a second Industrial Revolution but the product this time will not be textiles or machines or vehicles or even weapons. The product this time will be humans, themselves. (Replicants and Blade Runners?)
That is is optional. Again, and if you think about it from the viewpoint of the poor, it looks terrible, because throughout history, death was the great equalizer. The big consolation of the poor throughout history was that, “OK, these rich people they have it good but they’re going to die, just like me.”
But think about the world, say in 50 years, 100 years, where the poor people continue to die but the rich people, in addition to all the other things they get, they also get a exemption from death.
Once you really solve a problem like direct brain-computer interface; when brains and computers can interact directly; for example – to take just one example – that’s it, that’s the end of history; that’s the end of biology, as we know it. Nobody has a clue when what will happen, once you solve this. (Upload your consciousness into the cloud)
If life can basically break out of the organic realm into the vastness of the inorganic realm, you cannot even begin to imagine what the consequences will be, because your imagination at present is organic.
It is the new attitude, I think is to treat old age and death as technical problems, no different, in essence than any other disease. It’s like cancer, it’s like Alzheimer’s, it’s like tuberculosis.
You don’t need children, you can have a pension fund. You don’t need somebody to take care of you. You don’t need neighbors and sisters or brothers to take care of you when you’re sick; the state takes care of you, the states provide you with police, with education, with help with everything, in terms of ideas, in terms of religions.
The most interesting place today in the world in religious terms is Silicon Valley. It’s not the Middle East. This is where the new religions are being created now by people like Ray Kurtzweil and this these are the religions that will take over the world . . .