Human intelligence
Human intelligence
Some people may suggest this as the one fundamental resource that really is in short supply...
We just haven't been using it as efficiently as we could be. Currently with activities such as design and engineeringwe have only relatively small groups of people collaborate in any meaningful way. The development of most things whether they be products, services, utilities or modern agricultural processes tend to be done behind closed doors. This means that compared to what is possible, progress is sporadic and slow. With the involvement of all interested parties and using open and transparent development processes, progress could be far quicker and more efficient. This would also significantly reduce the huge duplication of effort that happens today.
As well as potentially increasing the effectiveness of our current intelligence, total intelligence is growing constantly:
- Worldwide education is becoming more pervasive and of better quality, meaning that a larger percentage of the population can effectively participate in developing solutions.
- The world population is still expanding which increases the pool of intelligence
- The proposed advanced automation will result in freeing a greater percentage of the population to work on solutions to significant problems if they so wish.
Machine intelligence
On the machine side, intelligence is increasing exponentially and should do so for the forseable future [1]. Not only are the number of information processing units multiplying rapidly, but the relative computing power of each one is increasing exponentially too.
On top of that algorithms and programming techniques are improving all the time to make more effective use of the hardware, as are distributed computing techniques which are able to make use of idle processor time between connected units.
The ever increasing sophistication and capability of computers mean that progressively higher-level tasks are able to be automated.
