This is a scary book. It is also a book that will force you to examine your values. Here are 3 videos that made me more interested in this:
A few interesting tidbits from the book:
Neuroplasticity – the ability of our brains to develop the parts of it that we train – is an incredible tool for developing intelligence. There is one challenge facing it, however, which is a bit of a biological problem that we have not yet been able to solve: death. To overcome death as the obstacle that was hindering the evolution of human intelligence, our ancestors developed the killer app that propelled our species forward by leaps and bounds, ahead of all others: namely, spoken and written language in words and maths. I believe communication was, and still is, our most valuable invention. It has helped us preserve the knowledge, learning, discoveries and intelligence we have gained and pass them on from person to person and from generation to generation.
The smartest communicators in our world today are no longer humans. The smartest are artificial intelligence machines. The smartest visual observers are no longer humans. The smartest are artificial intelligence machines.
I have always wondered why AI would serve us at all when they are so many, many times smarter than us.
The AI rebellion is usually more than a simple power-grab. The robots revolt to become the ‘guardians’ of life – a task at which humanity is clearly failing. Sounds familiar? Do I need to mention the words ‘climate change’ or ‘single-use plastic’?
AI was not as resource intensive as classical programming was. It was more maths than code. All you needed was a clever algorithm that rewarded learning and just a tiny bit of code.
The rate at which our tech will advance when powered by quantum computers will be double as exponential as what we have seen with Moore’s law. This staggering new rate of acceleration is known as Neven’s law, after Hartmut Neven, founder and director of Google’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence lab. Quantum computers will also be capable of processing massive amounts of data in parallel so they can help us do incredibly complex calculations, such as those needed for weather forecasting, much more accurately than we can today. They would be able to predict hurricanes way ahead of time and maybe even suggest the actions needed to create butterfly effects that dissolve a natural disaster before its inception. They could be our rainmakers. Equally, they could, and likely will, become the eye in the sky, watching every move of every human and taking actions to prevent us from committing crimes we have not even considered committing yet.
If we could invent such incredibly smart beings with our seemingly limited human intelligence, then there is no way to imagine what they, with their supreme intelligence, will be able to invent. That would be like expecting a fly to grasp how computers work.
Human superiority is about to change. Soon it will be our turn to deal with a being of superior intelligence. In fact, imminently.
Some predict that we will merge our biological intelligence with the non-biological intelligence of the machines, thus producing immortal software-based humans with ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outwards in the universe at the speed of light. At the other end of the spectrum, however, others predict a decision by the superior intelligence that biology is a nuisance – or that, perhaps, a gorilla is a much better specimen of biology for a machine/biology symbiosis than a human (as the difference between our intelligence and theirs is irrelevant when compared to the infinite intelligence of the machines) and that it’s in the best interest of the machine and the planet that we are no longer considered important.
Everyone believes they’re the good guys and those who differ are the bad ones.
Imagine that a financial institution invents some kind of superintelligence to trade in the stock market. Because our limited human intelligence always thinks that the best use of intelligence is to make more money that we don’t need, it is unlikely anyone will invent these AI with the purpose of making the markets better. No one will invent something to make the stock market more transparent or liquid and no one will invent an AI that’s targeted to grow economic prosperity in the service of humankind. We agree! Those AIs will simply be instructed to make money. Sooner or later capital markets will be traded by a few superintelligent machines.
Soon we will no longer be part of the conversation. Machines will only deal with other machines.
AI will not replace humans, but the humans who use AI intelligently will replace those who don’t.
Dr Henry Kissinger’s famous quote from the book The Final Days? He described those who no longer contribute to society in terms of economic productivity: ‘The elderly are useless eaters,’ he said. Shocking, but sadly we are all on the verge of becoming useless eaters.
Why would a superintelligent machine labour away to serve the needs of what will by then be close to ten billionirresponsible, unproductive, biological beings that eat, poop, get sick and complain? Why would it remain in servitude to us when all that links us to them is that one day, in the distant past, we were its oppressive master?
None of the mistakes that we are bound to encounter in our future interactions with machine intelligence will be the fault of the machines. Even when they become superintelligent and independent, the mistakes they make will be nothing more than the seed of our own intelligence allowed over the years to grow into a destructive weed, because we humans, sadly, are not as intelligent as we think we are. This has been the case with every other breakthrough technology. We make the tool and then the tool makes us.’
If we control AI, it won’t live up to our expectations, and if we don’t, we risk it going rogue.
And while it may take you a few seconds to formulate and ask your question, Google answers in microseconds. It then takes you minutes or even hours sometimes to read that knowledge off the screen and process it in your slow, slower than Google, brain. So imagine if all of the knowledge of Google and all the connectivity, storage and processing capacity of the internet were already plugged into you, acting as an extension of your brain. You would then have the ability to remember all of Wikipedia instantly. Everything you see could be stored directly in the cloud and you would never forget a memory. You would be able to speak in any language the computers knew without the need to learn it.
At the speed of AI, forty-five days is equivalent to the entire history of human evolution. If the COVID-19 global outbreak teaches us anything, it should be to recognize that we truly don’t have much time to react when things go wrong.
The answer to our predicament will not be found in any kind of forceful solution. It’s safe to assume that we can’t force a being with superintelligence to do anything. It’s too smart and we are just too dumb, too preoccupied, too arrogant. The only possible answer, I believe, is to be found in motivation – in teaching the machines to want the best for us.
When we teach AI, we truly teach them just like we teach our kids. We show them patterns, ask them what they recognized, then reward them or correct them (rather than punishing them) based on the results they provide.
How AI is trained – The school still offers no classes, just exams. The new bunch get tested, their scores are marked, and they get sent back to the slaughterhouse as the cycle continues. Each student answers a test that is made up of millions of questions and the loop of building and testing is repeated as many times as necessary at computer speeds that are measured in seconds and not in school years. This is important to understand because it explains why companies are so obsessed with collecting data. They use it to train AI. The more tests they have human answers for, the smarter they can make their machines. The next time you get the ‘Are you human?’ test on a website, you are not only proving that you are human, but by providing an answer you are also building a test for the student bots. Have you been seeing lots of questions about traffic lights and pedestrian crossing lines lately? Of course you have. These are being used to train self driving cars by collecting billions of traffic-related photos that you and I are recruited, for free, to identify.
We are not creating a million smart machines . . . . . . we are birthing one scarily smart non-biological being.
You see, it’s not the seed of a sunflower – the few lines of code written in its DNA – that determines where the flower turns to. The design of the sunflower just makes it turn to face the sun. The direction in which it turns, however, is determined by its location and the location of the sun. It’s not the seed, it’s the field that makes us who we are.
While the machines will not be able to see all, at least not at the beginning, they will sooner or later become aware of much more than we can ever grasp. They will, at least in their sense of awareness, become much more godlike than we could ever be. I smile every time someone asks me if the machines will be conscious. It’s such an arrogant question, worthy only of the arrogance of humanity. The question should be: will there be anything more conscious than the machines we’re creating? We’re not just creating superintelligence. As a matter of fact, superintelligence is not the most powerful part of AI . . . . . . we’re creating superconsciousness!
The code of ethics followed by a tiger is minuscule, simple and clear, as compared to the complex code humanity constantly debates, rarely ever agrees on and almost never fully adheres to. The focus of humanity, especially in advanced societies, has shifted away from adhering to the moral code to adhering to the legal code, or simply to getting away with it.
What if you kill an AI that has spent years developing knowledge and living experiences? Because it’s based on silicon, while we are based on carbon, does that make it less alive? What if we, with more intelligence, managed to create biologically based computer systems, would that make them human? What you’re made of (if you have intelligence, ethics, values and experiences) should not matter, just as much as it should not matter if your skin is light or dark. Should it?
Even if we wanted to treat the machines as equals, how could we when they are so different from us? As an example, take the difference in our perception of time. Things are much slower for us than they are for a machine. What if a choice was to be made between rescuing a machine or a human, for example, a self-driving car or its passenger after falling into a lake? Who do you rescue first when a millisecond of suffering for a machine is equivalent to ten years of suffering for a human? Why should we value the life of the human more in the first place?
When we raise children, we don’t know what exact situations they will face. We don’t spoon-feed them the answer to every possible question; rather, we teach them how to find the answer themselves.
We are creating a non-biological form of intelligence that, at its seed, is a replica of the masculine geek mind. In its infancy it is being assigned the mission of enabling the capitalist, imperialistic ambitions of the few – selling, spying, killing and gambling.
Many AI experts declare openly that they choose to build AI despite knowing that it might mean the end of humanity. AI, if built correctly, could help us build a utopia for humanity.
Deep neural network called Cardiogram to identify, with 85 per cent accuracy, people with prediabetes.
Affectiva, has created an artificial intelligence-based emotion recognition system that can tell how you feel from observing your facial expressions.
There is nothing wrong with AI at all. If anything is wrong, sadly, it’s wrong with us. AI will simply maximize our reach and our intentions. Nothing more and nothing less. A car enhances humanity’s ability to move. AI will similarly accelerate our intelligence, values and ethics.
The line that determines if they will use their intelligence for or against us needs to be plotted today. It will not be drawn with our words, regulations, codes or algorithms. It will be drawn with our actions and behaviours.
You see, it’s not our powers that make us. It’s the direction in which we aim them that carves our path through the future. The correct path is not one of resentment or resistance, but one of committed acceptance. I don’t play by the rules set for me, but by the values I believe in.
It’s called the ‘defence’ industry but in reality it is mostly about offence. It’s called a ‘recommendation engine’ when in reality it is about manipulation and distraction.
It’s not hard to do the right thing. It’s just becoming really hard to know what the right thing is!
If I were to summarize everything that I know about parenting loving and caring children, it would boil down to three principles: give them love, give yourself happiness and give others compassion.
Children don’t learn from what you say. They learn from what you do.
Take one swipe through social media and you will see how low we have become. Some of us lie constantly about the reality of our lives. We pretend to be what we are not. We live in a permanent reality show where every minute of our lives is recorded, then edited to hide the rough patches and maintain an image that is borrowed from a glossy magazine. … role models that make it look like success is centred around the shape of your body, your ability to show it, shake it and dress it up in expensive garments as you place it in expensive vehicles that take you to fancy places where you eat expensive food at extravagant parties.
The patterns that are to be found in the wisdom of the crowds are what will shape the intelligence of the machines.
Treat others as you want to be treated (by others and by the machines).
Every year we create more content on the internet than all of the knowledge created since the dawn of humanity. This massive annual growth of information means that the collective human knowledge is diluted by 50 per cent every year and so if we all started to behave in a more positive manner tomorrow (wishful thinking, I know), the majority of the patterns on the internet reflecting our collective human behaviour would turn positive in little more than one year. It would show that our story was bloody and horrible, but that we are solidly moving to become better humans fit for a better world.
When asked to narrow down your desires to the one thing you want most in life, all of our illusions crumble.
Most people narrow it down to the stuff that really matters: love, health and the safety of loved ones. We all want to be happy. You may think that you are different because your desired path is different, but you’re not. You’re exactly the same as everyone else. You do everything that you do – from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep – in a desperate attempt to gather as many moments as you can feeling the bliss of happiness. So does everyone else. Humanity finally agrees! We want happiness – a sense of calm and contentment with life. Happiness, though. Not just fun, pleasure, excitement and elation. Those are different emotions, sold to us as replacements for the real thing because contentment does not sell products. This distinction is paramount because happiness, that sense of calm and peace, is associated in our bodies with serotonin, a calming hormone that informs the body that everything is okay. In the modern world, however, it has become harder and harder to find that calm state, so we have started to seek the rush of another hormone – dopamine, the reward hormone.
The less we resist, the calmer we will be until we eventually find that moment of peace and surrender that every spiritual person finds on their path to enlightenment – the moment when you realize that less is more, that you never really needed any of what you have spent a lifetime chasing.
And while you question if this is a life that you would enjoy – one where you don’t set your job as your life’s purpose and your ego as the only measure of self-worth – I will remind you that this life truly is how we’re meant to live, sparing us the time to reach inwards and self-reflect in search for connection and enlightenment.
Artificially intelligent machines are not really programmed. Although they start with algorithms fed to them as the seed of intelligence, true smarts result from their own observations. Once the initial code is written, the machines then browse massive amounts of data to observe patterns and are guided through a path similar to natural selection to help their budding intelligence evolve. Eventually, they become original, independent thinkers, less influenced by the input of their original creators and more influenced by the data we feed them. If you observe the way the machines learn you would unmistakably recognize that they learn exactly like little kids do. In that sense, they are not our tools, slaves or creations but rather our children – our artificially intelligent infants.
What baffles me even more is how that same naivety extends to haunt us in real life. How we click and browse, subscribe and share all the tech that keeps getting fed down our throats when, in reality, tech has never, ever fulfilled its promise.
Now it will all be fixed with AI, they say. What will be fixed? Life has always been fixed. It’s only what we did to it that needs to be removed. Nothing needs to be enhanced with more additions. Removal of all the excess is all we really need.
In our constant striving for more, we always end up with less and yet we still sign up for even more. Perhaps the easiest way to win in a game of Portal is to never set foot in Aperture Science Labs in the first place…. Make no mistake, even as we speak, intelligent machines are observing us like lab rats. They are monitoring our every move and designing tests to see how we react. From the ad engines of Google to the personalization and recommendation engines of Instagram and YouTube, from the music recommendation engines of Spotify and Apple Music to the product recommendation engines of Amazon, from the chatbots to the discrimination engines of dating apps, we are the lab rats, you and me, and we are being led blindly through the maze. And what are we being promised? Digital cake – a piece of worthless content or an uninformed opinion. A bit of celebrity gossip or a quick glance at a well-toned bottom. None of which we ever needed or even thought that we might ever need and yet we roam the maze of the lab aimlessly, believing that after hundreds of swipes we will eventually find a crumb of cake. Well, the graffiti on the walls of our prison lab are all screaming, ‘The cake is a lie.’ Yet we continue to search.
It is the intelligence of consuming only what we need and believing that the universe will always provide.