AAI

AI. I would like to start this  by observing that if you aren’t afraid, truly afraid, then you are ignorant. You don’t appreciate, even  superficially,  what is happening in the labs of big tech. How the creation itself, the actual AI systems, are leaving the creators dumbstruck. And those who are at the top of the knowledge chain, the Sam Altmans of the world, are themselves very afraid. They stare into the maw of a machine that becomes more alien to them every day. Every hour. Here they designed it, they built it, they write endless papers, yet they don’t know how it works. They call this “emergence”. Google it. The first time in modern history that the technocrats who conceived and built the machine, can’t explain how it works. Literally. As an engineer I find it stunning. A thinking machine has busted down the doors and exploded onto the scene (chatgpt released in Nov 2022). It is improving at a absurd rate playing an ever increasing role in designing itself. In a race for dominancy it has become the most expensive thing we have ever built, a black hole for capital and raw energy. Even if all progress on it were to stop tomorrow human society will still be pitched into the maelstrom by its workings. But we know its still in frontier stages. It exploded into the medical scene by solving the protein folding problem – a massive accomplishment expected to have taken many decades to solve. It can digest everything ever written and find patterns beyond human imaginations. Disease diagnosis and cures are expected to mount far faster then we can evaluate. Ho hum. Another week, another cure for cancer. Ditto for major scientific breakthroughs which normally happen only a few times per century. We are unstoppably accelerating towards the gates of a world where every fortnight, nothing is the same. And again and again. The sheer G force of change will be crushing. Even if we, humanity, could live in harmony with a superintelligence, a thousand times or a million times more intelligent than us – like us living with a cockroach – we will be societally shredded by accelerating inequality. Weapons, financial instruments, medical, education, art, transportation, space, virtual reality human sexuality and even DNA are all going to become unrecognizable.  Its an arms race. Then arrival of AAI, artificial autonomous intelligence – the  point at which the machines can survive without us. A decade at most. Finally we play our last card – consciousness. I optimistically predict a Deus Ex Machina at that point. One that neither us nor even the ancient Greeks could have imagined.