In the next few decades, insurance companies will have to remake themselves because 40,000 people a year will not die in car accidents.
“I will be able to travel from New York City to Tokyo in three hours, because companies are developing supersonic jets—without the sonic boom” that doomed the earlier models.
Since capitalism means setting prices by supply and demand, AI will enable the world to have “perfect capitalism” with infinite knowledge of supply and demand, he said. “Stock brokers will no longer sell stocks; they will provide intellectual capital, creativity and leadership. Savvy wisdom cannot be digitalized.”
The losers in the AI era will be workers doing repetitive tasks and middlemen. The winners will be the plumbers and police officers of the world. The future also will need people to design and maintain AI systems.
Initially, AI will cost jobs, but then it will create jobs, he predicted.
“Artists will visualize a creation and it will appear in their hands. You will select a pair of sneakers online, and a 3-D printer in your living room will create them,” Kaku said.
“We already have the capability to do 3-D printing out of cloth and metals,” as well as plastics. Body parts such as ears and even gallbladders can be replicated using plastic and human cells now.
“Next will be a liver, for those who want to go out and drink tonight … and eventually the brain,” he said. “We can already store memories and skills in computers.
“Research on the brain has proved some old wives’ tales to be true,” he noted. Teenagers do have brain damage, because their prefrontal lobes that guide risk-taking behavior are not fully developed. And a man talking to a beautiful woman does become stupid, judging by blood flow in the brain.
The current climate where a person has a cell phone, a tablet, a laptop and a computer will no longer exist. Instead, people will have one device with a flexible screen that can be unrolled to the size needed, Kaku said.