AI can go on to make our lives easier and better or it can go on to make them difficult—it all depends on input and regulations.
The ongoing development of AI could be best described as akin to the uncontrolled staggering forward movement of a one-year old child (thank you Priyanka). Her older sister and parents worry that she may fall and hurt herself but there is little that they can do other than follow her around and try to ensure that she doesn’t really take a tumble.
Fast forward by 10, 20 or 30 years and that staggering child is now a grown human. Whether she will be a beautiful person—like, say, Nelson Mandela or JRD Tata or Roger Federer or just the lovely you—or, in the words of Marina Abramovich, the celebrated performance artist, an “[expletive] human being” —like Trump, Putin, most of the conceited tech and business “stars” or the horrible you—really depends on the inputs she gets from her family and growing environment and, of course, providence, which has the loudest say.
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So, too, with AI. Many of the leading lights at the cutting edge of AI research and practice believe that we are close to a point where AI models begin to control themselves—in other words, a world where all meaningful decisions are taken by machines. Fearing that these super-intelligent machines will take their cue from the (expletive) human beings who currently run most governments, business, and technology, many voices—from both within and outside the industry—have been calling for a complete halt of certain types of AI development, or, at least, more stringent regulation.
Governments are heeding this concern and have been working at speed to develop regulations that would enable the best and control the worst of this new magic. However, looking to past efforts by governments—let’s say with regulating social media—it is more than likely that the results of their efforts will be effectively zero. (It is worth noting that China is the only government that has had the awareness and ability to put effective constraints on social media companies.) Thus, the odds are in favor of a new reality in a few years where there will be super-intelligent machines at various nodal points of life.
But is this something to be concerned about? What if the one-year old girl grows up to be a combination of Mandela, JRD and Roger? There is no prima facie reason to believe that super-intelligent machines will be venal and focused only on profit and power. Granted, they will have been trained on information and data from our existing world, but if they are, indeed, genuinely super-intelligent, it seems obvious that they would evolve a new paradigm of life, where, perhaps, the value of nursing a sick person back to health will be seen (and rewarded) as economically more valuable than, say, running a $50 billion hedge fund.
Geoffrey Hinton, considered by many to be the godfather of AI, pointed out that “…it’s quite conceivable that humanity is [just] a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence.”
And this is the exciting part. Imagine a world run by super-intelligent and well-meaning forces—the proverbial benevolent (electronic) dictatorship. To calm the reactionaries in the world, we would have all the freedom we wanted unless we breached a line where our personal gain was more than the damage done to, say, other people, the environment, or society at large. Ideally, these lines should not be drawn; rules would not be laid down. We would have to discover them ourselves through trial and error—if we transgressed, our hands (and other parts) would be automatically tied. Our consciences would get stronger and stronger. And our lives happier and happier.
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To be sure, some of the concerns come from thoughtful well-meaning people. As I wrote in an earlier article “Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, constructed an example of the UN asking an AGI (artificial general intelligence) to help de-acidify the oceans, specifying that any by-products be non-toxic and not harm fish. In response, the AI system comes up with a self-multiplying catalyst that achieves all stated aims, but the ensuing chemical reaction uses a quarter of all the oxygen in the atmosphere. ‘We all die slowly and painfully,’ Russell concluded. ‘If we put the wrong objective into a super-intelligent machine, we create a conflict that we are bound to lose.’”
To me, the fallacy in his argument is the assumption that we can know what the super-intelligent machine will come up with. To me, super-intelligent means something we could not possibly comprehend, which means it would not come up with such a solution, unless it was the only one that worked, in which case, perhaps our time on Earth would be over.
Fighting technological development because of that fear sounds foolish to me. After all, since we don’t know the future, why must we assume the worst. Remember the one-year old girl stumbling forever forward—there is every chance that providence will make her a great leader and providence will make the new AI-driven world beyond wonderful.
AI can go on to make our lives easier and better or it can go on to make them difficult—it all depends on input and regulations.
The ongoing development of AI could be best described as akin to the uncontrolled staggering forward movement of a one-year old child (thank you Priyanka). Her older sister and parents worry that she may fall and hurt herself but there is little that they can do other than follow her around and try to ensure that she doesn’t really take a tumble.
Fast forward by 10, 20 or 30 years and that staggering child is now a grown human. Whether she will be a beautiful person—like, say, Nelson Mandela or JRD Tata or Roger Federer or just the lovely you—or, in the words of Marina Abramovich, the celebrated performance artist, an “[expletive] human being” —like Trump, Putin, most of the conceited tech and business “stars” or the horrible you—really depends on the inputs she gets from her family and growing environment and, of course, providence, which has the loudest say.
So, too, with AI. Many of the leading lights at the cutting edge of AI research and practice believe that we are close to a point where AI models begin to control themselves—in other words, a world where all meaningful decisions are taken by machines. Fearing that these super-intelligent machines will take their cue from the (expletive) human beings who currently run most governments, business, and technology, many voices—from both within and outside the industry—have been calling for a complete halt of certain types of AI development, or, at least, more stringent regulation.
Governments are heeding this concern and have been working at speed to develop regulations that would enable the best and control the worst of this new magic. However, looking to past efforts by governments—let’s say with regulating social media—it is more than likely that the results of their efforts will be effectively zero. (It is worth noting that China is the only government that has had the awareness and ability to put effective constraints on social media companies.) Thus, the odds are in favor of a new reality in a few years where there will be super-intelligent machines at various nodal points of life.
But is this something to be concerned about? What if the one-year old girl grows up to be a combination of Mandela, JRD and Roger? There is no prima facie reason to believe that super-intelligent machines will be venal and focused only on profit and power. Granted, they will have been trained on information and data from our existing world, but if they are, indeed, genuinely super-intelligent, it seems obvious that they would evolve a new paradigm of life, where, perhaps, the value of nursing a sick person back to health will be seen (and rewarded) as economically more valuable than, say, running a $50 billion hedge fund.
Geoffrey Hinton, considered by many to be the godfather of AI, pointed out that “…it’s quite conceivable that humanity is [just] a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence.”
And this is the exciting part. Imagine a world run by super-intelligent and well-meaning forces—the proverbial benevolent (electronic) dictatorship. To calm the reactionaries in the world, we would have all the freedom we wanted unless we breached a line where our personal gain was more than the damage done to, say, other people, the environment, or society at large. Ideally, these lines should not be drawn; rules would not be laid down. We would have to discover them ourselves through trial and error—if we transgressed, our hands (and other parts) would be automatically tied. Our consciences would get stronger and stronger. And our lives happier and happier.
To be sure, some of the concerns come from thoughtful well-meaning people. As I wrote in an earlier article “Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, constructed an example of the UN asking an AGI (artificial general intelligence) to help de-acidify the oceans, specifying that any by-products be non-toxic and not harm fish. In response, the AI system comes up with a self-multiplying catalyst that achieves all stated aims, but the ensuing chemical reaction uses a quarter of all the oxygen in the atmosphere. ‘We all die slowly and painfully,’ Russell concluded. ‘If we put the wrong objective into a super-intelligent machine, we create a conflict that we are bound to lose.’”
To me, the fallacy in his argument is the assumption that we can know what the super-intelligent machine will come up with. To me, super-intelligent means something we could not possibly comprehend, which means it would not come up with such a solution, unless it was the only one that worked, in which case, perhaps our time on Earth would be over.
Fighting technological development because of that fear sounds foolish to me. After all, since we don’t know the future, why must we assume the worst. Remember the one-year old girl stumbling forever forward—there is every chance that providence will make her a great leader and providence will make the new AI-driven world beyond wonderful.
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