AI, it could be awesome

“Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit” is yet another book on AI, and to be honest, it does not add much to the pantheon of books. It identifies the issues, but is particularly weak on offering solutions to some of the existential issues that we are facing.  The authors, Eric Schmidt, Henry A. Kissinger and Craig Mundie, are the only thing interesting about the book.

A question of survival

The advent of artificial intelligence is a question of human survival, with two alignment problems:

  • The technical alignment of human values and intentions with the actions of AI.
  • The diplomatic alignment of humans with their fellow humans.

Six scenarios

The authors envision six scenarios:

  1. Humanity will lose control of an existential race between multiple actors trapped in a security dilemma.
  2. Humanity will suffer the exercise of supreme hegemony by a victor unharnessed by the checks and balances traditionally needed to guarantee a minimum of security for others.
  3. There will not be just one supreme AI but rather multiple instantiations of superior intelligence in the world.
  4. The companies that own and develop AI may accrue totalizing social, economic, military, and political power.
  5. AI might find the greatest relevance and most widespread and durable expression not in national structures but in religious ones.
  6. Uncontrolled, open-source diffusion of the new technology could give rise to smaller gangs or tribes with substandard but still substantial AI capacity.

Acceleration

It is mainly the acceleration we need to worry about. That means that objects in the future are closer than they appear. Although we may feel temporarily secure in the mapping of our immediate reality, we have little conception of what lies beneath us or beyond us. The latest capabilities of AI, impressive as they are, will appear weak in hindsight as its powers increase at an accelerating rate. Powers we have not yet imagined are set to infuse our daily lives. Future systems will facilitate enormous and largely beneficial advances, improving our health while generating wealth. But these capabilities come with technical and human risks, some of which are known and some unknown.

A polymathic on steroids

Imagine a polymathic mind on steroids. No sleep, no rest, multitasking, always on, always improving and learning. The ultimate polymath. In exploring the frontier of human knowledge, it can process and generate representations of masses of information at a ferocious rate of speed. Moreover, equally equipped to explore kilometres of outer space and nanometers of human biology, AI’s probing of reality is notably unconstrained by subjective experience or physical labour, by human brainpower or human senses. Moving simultaneously in multiple directions and multiple dimensions, it generates representations of information in high-dimensional space, involving relationships within and among innumerable fields and subfields, and from those complexly networked representations, it derives its conclusions. The most serious challenge will involve whether and how such exploration reflects—or contradicts—our perception of reality and our human purpose. Remember, AIs are not born, do not die, feel neither insecurity nor fear. Their reality is not ours.

120 million times faster already

The physical scale of our human brain is dictated by our anatomy. Human brains must fit inside a human skull. The average AI supercomputer is already 120 million times faster than the processing rate of the human brain. Constantly growing and getting more and more access, unlimited by boundaries. With perfect recall.

Beyond human

An AI model similarly infers rather than recalls. Superior speed facilitates this inference across a broader, deeper array of learned information than a human could ever hope to attain. The truths produced by AI are manufactured by processes that humans cannot replicate. Machine reasoning, which does not proceed via human methods, is beyond human subjective experience and outside the capacity of humans.

Technium

With proliferating internet-enabled devices and sensors blanketing the earth, connected AIs could consolidate these devices’ inputs to create a highly granular “vision” of the physical world. Read “What technology wants“. There will be millions of AI systems, likely to be at once highly specialized and part of the fabric of our lives, as well as a smaller number of extremely powerful machines “generally intelligent”.

A different life form?

Already, AI systems are showing evidence of perceiving a universe that exists beyond the confines of the dataset used to construct their custom slice of reality. There are unique aspects to AI that are not augmentations of human abilities. It is potentially a different type of intelligence. In time, we should expect that they will come to conclusions about history, the universe, the nature of humans, and the nature of intelligent machines—developing a rudimentary self-consciousness in the process. Read “Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence“.

AI evolving

As AI grows more powerful, the future will likely bring a significant evolution and diversification. New infrastructures and techniques for machine learning, so long as they are unconstrained, will spawn generations of AI with increasing diversity, breadth, capacity, and complexity. Today, AI is predominantly a thinking machine, not an implementing machine. Ultimately, there will be a new genus of AI: machines that can not only interpret our real world but also plan for it. The arrival of such a “perfect planner” may occur sooner than we expect, and adaptation to it is already a priority for researchers, including AI’s physical embodiment. The future will be defined by AI’s engineering of high-dimensional, complex systems: human economies, biological life, and the climate of entire planets, others and our own.

Some questions 

  • How will AIs characterize and weigh humans’ imperfect rationality against other human qualities?
  • How long before a reality-perceiving AI asks itself not just how much agency a human has but also how much agency a human should have?
  • Would networking intelligence make their processes more opaque than the processes of lone intelligence? Or would they operate on an informational basis—extracted at superhuman speed, scale, and resolution from unprecedented connections among disparate fields of study and amalgamated or negotiated into a single output—that would confound our ability to judge their behaviour?
  • What happens when machines reach an intellectual—or physical—world’s end? As they get to know, and shape, our world, it is conceivable that they might come fully to understand the context of their creation and perhaps go beyond what we know as our world.
  • Will AIs be conquerors? Will human leaders become their proxies: sovereigns without sovereignty?
  • Will godlike AIs resurrect the once-ubiquitous human invocation of divine right, with AIs themselves as anointers of kings?
  • Does AI represent an exit from our familiar cycles or merely the start of a much longer one? The beginning of the end, or just the end of the beginning?
  • What if AI, while acting as an economic equalizer, sends the cost of intelligence, and therefore of labour, plummeting toward zero?
  • Will we become more like them, or will they become more like us?

A new paradigm

There is no doubt that AI will bestow upon our species a hitherto unimaginable means for advancing the enterprise of scientific discovery, lessening the burdens of labour, and reducing the misery of pain. But also create a new paradigm for warfare, geopolitics, diplomacy, governance, power, money, medicine, geo-engineering, etc. 

Techno optimism

The authors of this book believe that AI could conceivably be harnessed to generate a new baseline of human wealth and well-being:

  • If AI proves to be capable of physically distributing the goods that humans require for our fundamental material needs, then the volume of materials that could be generated and moved around the world will be unprecedented.
  • Distributed AI systems might be designed to connect, via mass-manufactured robots and AI-optimized infrastructural systems, to the unconnected.
  • AI could reduce talent gaps and equalize resource distributions.
  • Consider the possibilities that might emerge from periods of human focus that until now have been impossible to include in an ordinary person’s working week.
  • Mental and spiritual exercises, performed at length, could elevate human consciousness. Extended periods of heightened awareness may, in turn, assist our relational connections to other humans (and animals), strengthen our perceptions of the divine, and produce meaningfully elevated levels of individual well-being.
  • Unassisted humans performing apparently superhuman feats, especially those involving the use of our physical bodies, will no doubt remain events of fascination.
  • Art could flourish, for the ring of the authentic is likely to retain its charm.
  • The quest for meaning will expand.
  • Imagine if, just as a young Albert Einstein was tutored by Max Talmud (later Max Talmey), Voltaire by the Abbé de Châteauneuf, and Ada Lovelace (who wrote the first computer algorithm) by Mary Somerville, every child would now be pretty enabled in the same ways to master their mind and character.
  • University campuses might someday include spaces of congregation for teams of humans to interpret the discoveries of AI itself: that is, to understand them and to translate the most prominent among them into relevance for human life.
  • Medical care, relying on AI’s unprecedented resolution at the molecular and genomic scale, could become increasingly personal—with drugs, along with their methods of delivery, tailored to each individual’s unique metabolic profile, risk of addiction, estimated tolerances, and susceptibility to potential side effects.
  • AI could also move us away from treatment and closer to prevention.
  • Magnified by AI, some medical advances will move from therapies to extensions of human longevity.

Artificial humans?

Biological engineering efforts designed for tighter human fusion with machines are already underway. Starting with physical interconnects using chips in the human brain, they seek a faster, more efficient way to bridge biological and digital intelligence. Indeed, not only could attempts to construct such “brain-computer interfaces” bolster humanity’s effort to integrate with machines, but neural engineering may be only an intermediate phase of transition toward actual symbiosis. Transhumanism.

A world transformed

The cycle of creation—technological, biological, sociological, political—is entering a new phase. No matter the eventual trajectory of AI, we are facing a world transformed, hopefully for the better. The unsolved question is: Who will decide?  Today, no president, prime minister, supreme leader, general secretary, or monarch would be sufficiently prepared for the arrival of outsiders whose timing and advanced technology made them appear godlike. AI discovery is a project led almost exclusively by private corporations and entrepreneurs, with states emerging as supplementary backers. 

Different geopolitics

The tolerance for risk among democratic societies and the uncertain future of international gamesmanship will continue to be a significant X factor in the realm of artificial intelligence. And that raises the possibility of a paradigm shift in the primary standard for measuring national strength, which has moved through the centuries from territory to resources to capital to human capital—and now, perhaps, to computing capital. This brings us back to the measurement of success. An AI driven by GDP? A Marxist AI? . I am hoping for a Buddhist AI

Read Neal Asher

Regardless, when you start thinking about AI, my ongoing advice is to start reading Neal Asher. His books give a fantastic perspective on where AI could potentially bring us. It could be awesome.

sensemaking cover

WHY REINVENT THE WHEEL AND WHY NOT LEARN FROM THE BEST BUSINESS THINKERS? AND WHY NOT USE THAT AS A PLATFORM TO MAKE BETTER BUSINESS DECISIONS? ALONE OR AS A TEAM.

Sense making; morality, humanity, leadership and slow flow. A book about the 14 books about the impact and implications of technology on business and humanity.

Ron Immink

I help companies by developing an inspiring and clear future perspective, which creates better business models, higher productivity, more profit and a higher valuation. Best-selling author, speaker, writer.

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