The world is in the grip of a terrible malaise. According to just about everyone, 2017 was the worst year in recent history. A petty tyrant rules the White House. War with North Korea looms. Democracy itself is under threat.
What this proves is that just about everyone needs to get a grip. If only we could shake our sick obsession with Donald Trump, we might be able to appreciate how good things really are. So stick your head above the parapet. The view is fine. As you were wallowing in despair, the world was actually getting better. Here are some examples.
As the world's population soars, prosperity is soaring, too. In 1987, 54 per cent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa lived in extreme poverty, according to Oxford economist Max Roser. Today, the number is down to 41 per cent. In South Asia, the extreme poverty rate declined from 48 per cent to 15 per cent. The world rate fell from 35 per cent to 11 per cent.
People are living longer, too. Mr. Roser says half the people born in Britain in 1851 died before they reached age 50. Half of those born today will reach 95. Between 1990 and 2015, according to the World Health Organization, the infant mortality rate fell by more than half.
And even though fires and hurricanes made a lot of news, the annual death toll from natural disasters is in decline. "2017 has been a very clement year," Debarati Guha-Sapir, who heads the outfit that runs the International Natural Disaster database, told Buzzfeed, which added that "economic development and better planning have increased the resilience of communities across the developing world." As well, one major cause of death – famine – has declined dramatically.
Declining death and poverty rates are just one measure of well being. Access to technology is another. Cellphone access has exploded in poor countries, and has become a significant force for economic development. In sub-Saharan Africa, there are now 76 cellphone subscriptions for every 100 people. That's not all. In 35 years, the cost of computing power (one gigabyte of RAM) has fallen to $5 from $6-million.
The news cycle is understandably obsessed with what went wrong yesterday. That's why the media tend to ignore the quite remarkable march of human progress. They are also likely to underreport the developments that are going to transform our world. My candidate for the most undercovered story of the year is the revolution in artificial intelligence, which will be playing out long after Mr. Trump has been demoted to a bizarre footnote in history. What happens when machine learning leapfrogs human learning? We are about to find out.
This year, a computer program called AlphaZero (developed by a company owned by Google) was instructed to teach itself to play chess. It learned in just four hours. After 24 hours of playing against itself, it was able to vaporize not just every human player, but also the reigning world computer chess program. It made moves so otherworldly that no mere mortal could fathom them. "AlphaZero had done more than just master the game, it had attained new heights in ways considered inconceivable," ChessBase said.
Google and the other giant tech companies are investing fortunes in machine learning. It is a technological tsunami that will take years to reach the shore. Right now, it's nothing more than a faint line on the far horizon. So far, its impact is largely theoretical, and many people think its potential is overblown. But watch out. It will change everything.
For example, if autonomous vehicles replace even a fraction of the millions of professional drivers (taxi, bus, truck) on the road, the productivity gains will be significant. The same is true for call centres, which employ nearly three million people in the United States alone. Improved voice-recognition systems and better question-answering software could be able to answer 70 per cent or more of all calls, researchers say. Analysts at McKinsey & Co. estimate that currently demonstrated technologies "could automate 45 per cent of the activities people are paid to perform."
As they say in tech-land, never mistake a clear view for a short distance. Still, it's likely that advances in artificial intelligence will reshape "transportation, health, science, finance, and the military" as researcher Katja Grace predicts. She and her colleagues conducted a large survey of machine intelligence experts to find out just how long they think it will take for machines to outperform humans in various activities. Their estimates: 2024 for translating languages; 2026 for writing high-school essays; 2027 for driving a truck; 2031 for working in retail; 2049 for writing a bestselling book; and 2053 for working as a surgeon. Which means that not long from now, a robot could do my job – and probably yours, too.
What happens when machine learning replaces human cognitive skills? How will millions of former truck drivers, call-centre employees and opinion columnists react? What happens if the robots decide they don't like us? We (and especially our children) are about to find out. And unlike the age of the Industrial Revolution, we won't have a century to adjust. So forget about Mr. Trump. We've got much more interesting things to worry about.