1. Someone with an idea for a song starts a band in their garage.

2. The band might start to audition for local bar owners, hoping one of the places would let them play.

3. If that goes well they might work their way up to a larger bar. People might begin to show up specifically to watch them play-though, aside from friends, family, and flyers, there were few ways to get the word out.

4. With luck, they might make it to a bigger bar and even more people might start showing up, though there were still few ways to get the word out beyond friends and family.

5. With more luck, a talent scout for a record label might happen to see them in that bar one night.

6. That record scout might ask the band to make a "demo tape," which the scout might then play for an executive at the label.

7. If the executive likes the tape, he might offer them a small contract to put an album together.

8. If the album comes out well, and the timing is right, the label might promote the new band to the few chain record stores that monopolized the industry or to a few key radio stations.

9. If the programming director of a radio station hears the song and likes it he might authorize it to be played on the air.

10. If the song is played on the air, listeners might like it and call in to request it. If so, it might go into a heavier rotation, which means it might eventually show up on a Billboard chart.

Today, that entire process can be replaced by one talented person with a video camera and a YouTube account. Yes, Bieber, I'm looking at you.

Our kids don't care about the way we used to do things. In fact, they likely resent it. The legacy systems that have been built over decades are meaningless to them. Some executive sitting in some corner office deciding who is going to be successful stands against everything our kids stand for. And that is exactly how we should be promoting capitalism. Despite the language games, it's capitalism that encourages progress and the transformation of industries, and it's progressives and socialism that encourage the status quo.

Hope My Publisher Isn't Reading This

The same kind of free-market transformation is happening in other industries as well. Take book publishing, for example. Twenty-seven-year-old Amanda Hocking spent years being rejected by book agents and traditional publishing houses. Desperate to make $300 so she could afford a trip to Chicago, Hocking self-published one of her paranormal thrillers by using Amazon.com. She was hoping to sell a few copies; she sold 1.5 million. No agents, no publishers, no bookstores or marketing companies or printing presses or delivery trucks. Just a talented writer who cut out all of the middlemen and took her work directly to the audience.

The truth is that our kids love and embrace capitalism perhaps more than any other generation has in our country's history. They just don't know it yet.

It's our job to make sure they do.

"We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything."

-Thomas Edison THE YEAR IS 1678 and you've just arrived in England via a time machine. You take out your new iPhone in front of a group of scientists who have gathered to marvel at your arrival. "Siri," you say, addressing the phone's voice-activated artificial intelligence system, "play me some Beethoven."

Dunh-Dunh-Dunh-Duuunnnhhh! The famous opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, stored in your music library, play loudly.

"Siri, call my mother."

Your mother's face appears on the screen, a Hawaiian beach behind her. "Hi, Mom!" you say. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

"Three," she correctly answers. "Why haven't you called more-"

"Thanks, Mom! Gotta run!" you interrupt, hanging up.

"Now," you say. "Watch this."

Your new friends look at the iPhone expectantly.

"Siri, I need to hide a body."

Without hesitation, Siri asks: "What kind of place are you looking for? Mines, reservoirs, metal foundries, dumps, or swamps?" (I'm not kidding. If you have an iPhone 4S, try it.) You respond "Swamps," and Siri pulls up a satellite map showing you nearby swamps.

The scientists are shocked into silence. What is this thing that plays music, instantly teleports video of someone across the globe, helps you get away with murder, and is small enough to fit into a pocket?

At best, your seventeenth-century friends would worship you as a messenger of God. At worst, you'd be burned at the stake for witchcraft. After all, as science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke once said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Now, imagine telling this group that capitalism and representative democracy will take the world by storm, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Imagine telling them their descendants will eradicate smallpox and regularly live seventy-five or more years. Imagine telling them that men will walk on the moon, that planes, flying hundreds of miles an hour, will transport people around the world, or that cities will be filled with buildings reaching thousands of feet into the air.

They'd probably escort you to the madhouse.

Unless, that is, one of the people in that group had been a man named Ray Kurzweil.

Kurzweil is an inventor and futurist who has done a better job than most at predicting the future. Dozens of the predictions from his 1990 book The Age of Intelligent Machines came true during the 1990s and 2000s. His follow-up book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, published in 1999, fared even better. Of the 147 predictions that Kurzweil made for 2009, 78 percent turned out to be entirely correct, and another 8 percent were roughly correct. For example, even though every portable computer had a keyboard in 1999, Kurzweil predicted that most portable computers would lack a keyboard by 2009. It turns out he was right: by 2009, most portable computers were MP3 players, smartphones, tablets, portable game machines, and other devices that lacked keyboards.

Kurzweil is most famous for his "law of accelerating returns," the idea that technological progress is generally "exponential" (like a hockey stick, curving up sharply) rather than "linear" (like a straight line, rising slowly). In nongeek-speak that means that our knowledge is like the compound interest you get on your bank account: it increases exponentially as time goes on because it keeps building on itself. We won't experience one hundred years of progress in the twenty-first century, but rather twenty thousand years of progress (measured at today's rate).

Many experts have criticized Kurzweil's forecasting methods, but a careful and extensive review of technological trends by researchers at the Santa Fe Institute came to the same basic conclusion: technological progress generally tends to be exponential (or even faster than exponential), not linear.

So, what does this mean? In his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil shares his predictions for the next few decades: In our current decade, Kurzweil expects real-time translation tools and automatic house-cleaning robots to become common.

In the 2020s he expects to see the invention of tiny robots that can be injected into our bodies to intelligently find and repair damage and cure infections.

By the 2030s he expects "mind uploading" to be possible, meaning that your memories and personality and consciousness could be copied to a machine. You could then make backup copies of yourself, and achieve a kind of technological immortality.

Age of the Machines?

"We became the dominant species on this planet by being the most intelligent species around. This century we are going to cede that crown to machines. After we do that, it will be them steering history rather than us."

-JAAN TALLINN, CO-CREATOR OF SKYPE AND KAZAA *

If any of that sounds absurd, remember again how absurd the eradication of smallpox or the iPhone 4S would have seemed to those seventeenth-century scientists. That's because the human brain is conditioned to believe that the past is a great predictor of the future. While that might work fine in some areas, technology is not one of them. Just because it took decades to put two hundred transistors onto a computer chip doesn't mean that it will take decades to get to four hundred. In fact, Moore's Law, which states (roughly) that computing power doubles every two years, shows how technological progress must be thought of in terms of "hockey stick" progress, not "straight line" progress. Moore's Law has held for more than half a century already (we can currently fit 2.6 billion transistors onto a single chip) and there's little reason to expect that it won't continue to.

Your Brain 2.0

There's no reason to expect that mind uploading can't be achieved with enough technological progress. Nearly all scientists who study the brain think the human mind is, like a computer, basically an information-processing system. But while neurons eventually die, silicon pathways live forever.

In 1995, consumers were forced to buy entire albums on CD for $15 to $20. Now? They download only the songs they want for $.99 each.

In 2010, Borders operated more than 500 book and music superstores around the world. Now? There are zero.

But the aspect of his book that has the most far-ranging ramifications for us is Kurzweil's prediction that we will achieve a "technological singularity" in 2045. He defines this term rather vaguely as "a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed."

Part of what Kurzweil is talking about is based on an older, more precise notion of "technological singularity" called an intelligence explosion. An intelligence explosion is what happens when we create artificial intelligence (AI) that is better than we are at the task of designing artificial intelligences. If the AI we create can improve its own intelligence without waiting for humans to make the next innovation, this will make it even more capable of improving its intelligence, which will . . . well, you get the point. The AI can, with enough improvements, make itself smarter than all of us mere humans put together.

The really exciting part (or the scary part, if your vision of the future is more like the movie The Terminator) is that, once the intelligence explosion happens, we'll get an AI that is as superior to us at science, politics, invention, and social skills as your computer's calculator is to you at arithmetic. The problems that have occupied mankind for decades-curing diseases, finding better energy sources, etc.-could, in many cases, be solved in a matter of weeks or months.

The Last Invention

"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."

-I. J. GOOD, STATISTICIAN WHO HELPED ALAN TURING CRACK THE ENIGMA CODE DURING WORLD WAR II *

Again, this might sound far-fetched, but Ray Kurzweil isn't the only one who thinks an intelligence explosion could occur sometime this century. Justin Rattner, the chief technology officer at Intel, predicts some kind of Singularity by 2048. Michael Nielsen, co-author of the leading textbook on quantum computation, thinks there's a decent chance of an intelligence explosion by 2100. Richard Sutton, one of the biggest names in AI, predicts an intelligence explosion near the middle of the century. Leading philosopher David Chalmers is 50 percent confident an intelligence explosion will occur by 2100. Participants at a 2009 conference on AI tended to be 50 percent confident that an intelligence explosion would occur by 2045.

If we can properly prepare for the intelligence explosion and ensure that it goes well for humanity, it could be the best thing that has ever happened on this fragile planet. Consider the difference between humans and chimpanzees, which share 95 percent of their genetic code. A relatively small difference in intelligence gave humans the ability to invent farming, writing, science, democracy, capitalism, birth control, vaccines, space travel, and iPhones-all while chimpanzees kept flinging poo at each other.

Intelligent Design?

The thought that machines could one day have superhuman abilities should make us nervous. Once the machines are smarter and more capable than we are, we won't be able to negotiate with them any more than chimpanzees can negotiate with us. What if the machines don't want the same things we do?

The truth, unfortunately, is that every kind of AI we know how to build today definitely would not want the same things we do. To build an AI that does, we would need a more flexible "decision theory" for AI design and new techniques for making sense of human preferences. I know that sounds kind of nerdy, but AIs are made of math and so math is really important for choosing which results you get from building an AI.

These are the kinds of research problems being tackled by the Singularity Institute in America and the Future of Humanity Institute in Great Britain. Unfortunately, our silly species still spends more money each year on lipstick research than we do on figuring out how to make sure that the most important event of this century (maybe of all human history)-the intelligence explosion-actually goes well for us.

Likewise, self-improving machines could perform scientific experiments and build new technologies much faster and more intelligently than humans can. Curing cancer, finding clean energy, and extending life expectancies would be child's play for them. Imagine living out your own personal fantasy in a different virtual world every day. Imagine exploring the galaxy at near light speed, with a few backup copies of your mind safe at home on earth in case you run into an exploding supernova. Imagine a world where resources are harvested so efficiently that everyone's basic needs are taken care of, and political and economic incentives are so intelligently fine-tuned that "world peace" becomes, for the first time ever, more than a Super Bowl halftime show slogan.

With self-improving AI we may be able to eradicate suffering and death just as we once eradicated smallpox. It is not the limits of nature that prevent us from doing this, but only the limits of our current understanding. It may sound like a paradox, but it's our brains that prevent us from fully understanding our brains.

TURF WARS.

At this point you might be asking yourself: "Why is this topic in this book? What does any of this have to do with the economy or national security or politics?"

In fact, it has everything to do with all of those issues, plus a whole lot more. The intelligence explosion will bring about change on a scale and scope not seen in the history of the world. If we don't prepare for it, things could get very bad, very fast. But if we do prepare for it, the intelligence explosion could be the best thing that has happened since . . . literally ever.

Beyond Bad Sci-Fi Movies