The Technological Singularity
Up until I was like 15, the way I found new music was through friends or songs that you hear in the background on my favorite TV shows or movies. This could be a really slow process if you, like me, have a somewhat unconventional taste in music. So, it was no surprise that I would only have a few new songs in my playlist every few months. But as of recent, that's definitely changed.
You see, Spotify has been able to identify my tastes remarkably well with this Discover Weekly and Unwrapped playlist. Spotify seems to know what I like better than some of my closest friends. It follows a similar trend of surprising improvements in the fields of natural language processing and machine learning. So, when did Spotify and other apps get this good, and what does it mean for the future of technology?
These and other recent advances are occurring at a surprising rate—or at least, that's what it seems like. After all, progressing exponentially, and we humans are very ill-equipped when it comes to visualizing or imagining such growth. We simply never evolved to do so. Animals, predators, and prey all move at a relatively constant rate; they don't keep accelerating. Technological progress, however, does.
As it turns out, this exponential growth means we might be stepping into some very uncharted territory in the near future. If technology continues to get better and better at its current pace, we will soon reach a stage where it not only matches but surpasses the intelligence of a human. Couple that with an ability to learn and an incentive to survive, and well, we don't know what will happen next.
This is the technological singularity. Borrowed from astrophysics, the term singularity refers to a tipping point beyond which all laws that are currently known simply fall apart—like how the laws of physics fall apart beyond the singularity of a black hole. A technological singularity is a similar tipping point when technological progress is so overwhelming that we will no longer be in control of it or the things that it will lead to.
In 1875, Karl Landsteiner, an Austrian biologist, noted that when a man was given a blood transfusion from another animal, the foreign blood tended to clump up in the blood vessels of a man, which can cause shock and ultimately lead to death. This and years of research that followed led him to discover blood groups, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1930. Today, he is remembered as the father of blood transfusion medicine, and we have him to thank for being able to donate and receive blood safely.
When there is a technological singularity, scientists predict computers will be able to make life-changing, Nobel Prize-winning discoveries just like this every five seconds. That may seem like an incredible future or potentially a life-threatening one, and that's exactly why the prospect of a technological singularity is so complicated. On one hand, it may seem like rapidly progressing technology can eventually enslave humanity, but it also has enormous potential to improve human life.
This potential is the reason why it is being developed so rapidly. There are enormous incentives to devote even more resources to the development of artificial intelligence, economic and otherwise. For example, it can help companies curate products each customer is more likely to buy—something practically impossible to do man for man. They can predict when demand is going to be low, to birth, and wastage. It can also conduct research faster than any human ever has.
These innovations can lead to other less inspiring changes in human society too. After all, if scientific research can be done with a computer, what use is there for researchers anymore? If cars can drive themselves, and nanobots can repair organs, and 3D printers can literally print bridges, are all jobs simply going to be replaced?
Well, at its current state, the technology we have is only good enough to replace repetitive labor, such as connecting a car door to its chassis. For most things that are more complicated, we still need human intervention. But it's not about now anyways. It's about the future, and without thorough consideration, we may be headed for unemployment the likes of which humanity has never seen.
If recent events haven't made it clear, it's not just about the economy or salaries, but also about the meaning that most of us tend to derive from our work. You know, not doing anything is, as it turns out, really, really boring. Okay, sometimes it's nice. We've established that technological progress is not slowing down anytime soon.
What happens when computers replace not only our labor but also our intellect? What happens when they can mimic intelligence and learn on their own? This could lead to a scenario where technology is not so friendly to us, or instead of just replacing us, it decides to do away with us completely. In such a situation, without much preparation, we would be completely powerless to empathize. What would happen to our species during such an event?
Scientists decided to look at what history tells us about how a more intelligent species—us humans—treats its less intelligent counterparts, monkeys. You know, the same monkeys that we caged up, killed, ran any and all tests on, and had no ethical qualms about until very recently? Yes, those monkeys. Sam Harris provides the analogy in his regard to help us visualize how we might be treated based on our own past behavior. He draws in the relationship we humans have with ants by saying we don't hate them, we don't go out of our way to harm them. In fact, sometimes we take pains not to harm them; we just step over them on the sidewalk. But whenever their presence seriously conflicts with one of our goals, we annihilate them without a thought.
This rather troubling thought has a lot of people concerned about the way in which we should be progressing towards the singularity. The best thing we could do as we head into the singularity is to ensure that AI develops into an ethically sound ecosystem instead of using it to spy, scam, and steal from people—which in reality is what is currently being used to do.
Then there are also concerns about defining when the singularity has been reached. What is consciousness? How do we know when machines have it? What is intelligence? What is of value to us? What is art, and what is not? All these questions need to be answered for us to know when machines are indeed more intelligent.
This is capable of triggering a modern renaissance that is not simply technological but also philosophical in that it causes us to reflect on the human experience like never before. It can also help us reflect on what we, as the most intelligent species, have done to our planet and its other inhabitants. But how near is all of this?
Ray Kurzweil, renowned inventor and futurist, has said we may reach the singularity by 2049, attributing this oddly specific date to what he calls price-performance calculations per consistent dollar. Look, I'll explain. He plotted these said numbers from 1980 through 2050. In 1981 and 2015, those numbers were roughly where he predicted them to be.
Others are skeptical of such claims. Most notable amongst them are Noam Chomsky, widely regarded as the father of modern linguistics and one of the most cited scholars alive. What makes his perspective interesting is that he perhaps possesses a deeper understanding of language than most of us. This is a very important part of creating a generally intelligent machine since understanding how we communicate with other humans will help us communicate with other potentially conscious machines.
Today's perspective is that we are nowhere near where we need to be in terms of our understanding of the cognitive processes that go on consciously and subconsciously to be able to mimic them. Can we define a theory of being smart? he asks. He's certainly right about the complexity of human language and the nuances of what we say versus what we mean. It's why emotions like irony, sarcasm, and rhetorical questions are still unsolved puzzles in the world of AI research.
But do we really need to be able to mimic the entire process if we can simply reproduce the effect? What if we are simply able to reprogram some aspects of learning and let computational ability take care of the rest?
Max Tegmark, an American-Swedish physicist from MIT, is interested in investigating the risk of extinction from artificial general intelligence. He likes to use the analogy that when man first discovered fire, it was a wonderful discovery that has paved the way for modern life. But it hasn't always been safe; it's caused a lot of death, pain, and suffering in the process.
But we are where we are because we were able to learn from our mistakes and devise things like fire escapes and fire extinguishers. AI might be the same at the start, but the only difference here is that we only have one shot. It's all or nothing. If AI lights a fire, we may never be able to extinguish it in hopes of the next time.
But there are critics who doubt that this is how the future will actually play out. Unlike Chomsky, they don't doubt the exponential progress or its ability to mimic human-like computation in the future. Instead, they don't know whether the future will be so aggressively against our survival.
While a technological singularity is coming, we shouldn't fear it; instead, we should embrace the progress that can bring. Such is also the perspective of Garry Kasparov, widely considered the best chess player of all time. He was on the other side when IBM's Deep Blue finally beat humanity's best at the game he had invented.
Garry believes that instead of seeing this as a man vs. machine contest, we should take it as an opportunity to realize the potential of augmentation. That's definitely more comfortable to think about, considering we've been augmenting ourselves with technology for decades now—first with things like calculators and more recently with mobile phones. After watching a recent Apple Keynote, it was mentioned that Apple CPUs have gotten over a hundred times faster in recent years, and their GPUs over a thousand times faster.
The singularity doesn't have to be an apocalyptic mess where every moving piece of metal is trying to kill us. It doesn't have to be a deceptive reality where no one and nothing can be trusted. It can simply be a reality where we're free to explore other dimensions of the human experience and engage in our creative pursuits—not just to put food on the table, but simply for the sake of them.
In both of the major criticisms against the idea of a technological singularity, neither party actually denies that it's coming. They're saying it's not coming anytime soon or that it's not going to be as bad as you think it is when it does, or you could argue that the technological singularity is nearer than we think and it's going to be much, much worse than we anticipate.
What then does it really matter how we prepare? What policies become? Whatever the answer, one thing remains the same: it's coming, and if I were you, I'd get ready. Speaking of technology, this is the most important time to take charge of your digital identity.
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