There’s no question that we are currently living through a technological revolution.
Many of these have happened before, where the world changes very rapidly as a result
of the advent and spread of a new technology.
Days the world changed is a common theme for our species from our earliest times.
In earlier times though, this took time to propagate, meaning that an invention in one
part of the world might take many years to go a thousand miles.
It was more a question of the day the village changed.
And then the next one, and the next as they heard the news.
That’s if the news was allowed to spread at all.
Don’t tell potential rivals about your discoveries in metallurgy.
While tool use itself may predate us, a kind of gift from our early hominid ancestors,
this type of revolutionary cycle was certainly the case for agriculture, a human technology
commencing around 12,000 years ago, that saw humanity move from living around caves and
rivers to building cities surrounded by fields.
And it wasn’t just one group of humans, agriculture appeared independently on different
continents at different times.
The domestication of plants and animals is something that’s very common in very different
civilizations, from Africa to Asia to Europe to the Americas.
Many different people pursued agriculture and domestication because, well, it was useful.
And we’re still doing it.
The revolution that was agriculture continues.
One can name many more such revolutions, the advent of alloying bronze, the smelting of
iron, the industrial revolution, the birth of the internet and so on.
And we’re still doing it.
The revolution continues.
Our current stage of the technological revolution is that of artificial intelligence, and like
past phases begun by our hominem ancestors, the effects it will have on humanity will
be wide ranging, and difficult to predict.
But maybe not quite yet.
While we do have amazing chat bots that are filling the internet with digitally generated
text, it’s also facing some pitfalls.
Take programs like ChatGPT.
These AI’s work on something known as Large Language Models, or LLMs.
These use the vast amount of human written text on the internet to generate a kind of
statistical model of human languages.
They can look for trends, so to speak, and determine what word combinations are most
likely and in turn generate them.
But there’s a pitfall here.
With an ever growing corpus of AI generated text appearing on the internet, there’s
a danger of a kind of feedback loop where one AI is being trained by the output of another
AI.
Think about that.
This starts to introduce biases over time, and it eventually first leads to a kind of
dumbing down effect, where the AI keeps seeing the same word combinations, even if they’re
wrong from another AI filling the internet with text, and repeats them.
Worse, they only ever see a very small fraction of what the original AI could do, thus the
pool of possible output shrinks.
In the end, An AI is only as smart as what it’s fed, and the internet is degrading.
It’s no longer written by us exclusively, but also AI’s.
This is made worse by the fact that AIs right now really don’t really have a way to verify
what they’re saying against reality.
They can’t say Right!
We’ll go out and take a walk and talk to people and look at the world and find out
what’s true.
They only have text.
Well, where does that text come from?
Increasingly, it’s AI generated and that will only get worse in the future.
So eventually as this cycle proceeds, the whole system collapses and just produces errors.
One possible fix is to put a cutoff date on the internet for AI’s, where they can only
see text written by humans before the advent of the chatbots, or introduce some human monitoring
of input before it’s too late and the cycle of collapse begins.
That starts at some point to resemble a house of cards.
In 200 years, are we going to feed AI’s only the content the internet from 200 years
previous?
We could end up in that position.
This is going to lead to some strange effects.
One currently hot area of concern about AI are digital twins.
Actor Tom Hanks recently speculated that AI would one day fully recreate him on screen
long after he’s physically dead.
There may well be new Tom Hanks Movies 200 years from now.
But this also means human actors are going obsolete, a current actor might be alright
still as far as the career goes, but once the best actors of our time become the standards
for all time, then who gets to be the next big actor?
No one.
But it’s worse than that, what if you can create hybrids of the most resonant attributes
of Harrison Ford, Patrick Stewart and Katharine Hepburn, then you can create an entirely new
acting persona that does not correspond to any one living person.
Rather it is a digitally optimized personality that may resonate even better than the humans
it drew from.
Needless to say, this is going to collapse the autograph collecting industry as well
as the acting industry, but we already see very satisfying, though not yet perfect, deep
fake technology.
It looks good, but not perfect.
In 5 years, deep fake will be perfect though.
But it’s going to seem a lot more real when the deep fake isn’t actually a fake, but
a new persona entirely, but still derived from past long dead people.
But in a way, isn’t that what we are?
We take our human interactions and the times in which we live with us throughout life.
This usually leads to much yelling of “get off my lawn” in middle age, but we do that.
Directors pay homage to past directors, scientists cite the work of previous scientists, musicians
cite the work of the previous generations of composers, and so on.
We are humans that look back to our huge corpus of writing and history for knowledge on how
to proceed to the future.
That’s not that different from AI.
Moreover, as this develops, we will have to ask questions about what makes a perfect actor,
writer or even Youtuber.
It’s entirely possible that there will come a day where the most interesting people aren't
actually people and never were.
They will be idealizations, which may be far more interesting than we are.
But with inventions like that,.I suspect there will be significant pushback to that along
with acceptance, and there may be a limit to what level of unreal people will accept,
a cartoon is one thing, a deep fake is another thing, but an utterly convincing personality
that you otherwise know is not real may be a step too far.
Unless it’s really charismatic, convincing and compelling in its message.
That’s another hill of beans we haven’t gotten to.
With deep fakes of actors, it may someday get to the point that you have to look up
movies to see if it’s really that actor, or a deep fake.
I mean if you’re 25 years old in 2050 exploring the history of film, you’re going to need
a record of just what films are historical and who was involved, versus deep fake films
that may be younger than you are that appear old.
Well, what happens when AI is generating the information, the wikipedias and IMBDs are
not being written by us humans any longer, but AI’s.
How does one know in a hundred years how old a movie is?
What is its authenticity?
It’ll probably not get that bad for a while, but consider this.
What also comes with this is the idea of AI’s writing custom movies for you, starring your
favorite actors.
An attractive potential, but it’s going to be a mess, both because of intellectual
property laws and licensing of franchises like Alien or Star Trek, but also in the union
negotiations to try to protect working actor’s professions, as has happened recently.
This process has already begun, and will dictate how AI develops from here on out in the entertainment
industry.
It’s going to be a very real problem if someone in the acting profession ends up with
a digital twin they have no control over who gets all the roles.
And there are already planned digital twins.
Actor James Earl Jones for example has licensed his voice to be replicated in future installments
of the Star Wars franchise should the need arise.
All of this highlights the problem with AI as it’s unfolding, it could cause obsolescence
in industries that no one had imagined before.
This is the true danger of AI, its unintended consequences, and not so much its envisioned
pitfalls.
That envisioned pitfall is the emergence of an Artificial Generalized Intelligence that
destroys or enslaves humanity.
This is possible, AI has shown some emergent properties, but when you track those properties
down the source usually becomes clear.
An example would be the Bard chatbot, which initially inexplicably responded to a foreign
language prompt it wasn’t programmed to do, but in reality the ability came from the
previous model it was based on.
But, this also brings back the original conundrum, just what do AI’s learn from each other,
and how is that implemented, and what is the end result?
A much greater threat than AGI taking over is its use as a tool.
In a world that sees cameras everywhere, cellphones, and so on the emergence of a surveillance
state comes onto the table.
But apocalyptic scenarios aside, imagine this scenario.
Someone is running a company and they acquire an AI assistant.
Initially, it just drafts emails, looks at business models and accounting, and mundane
things like ordering donuts for the breakroom.
Being capable of machine learning, it soon becomes better at these tasks than a human
employee would be, so naturally the AI would start climbing the corporate ladder, if not
in wages.
As time goes by without any errors, oversight of the still learning AI might slacken, and
it may be given increasingly more to do in the company as its competency is further proven.
Profits soar from efficiency, and any competitor companies that haven’t adopted an AI for
the same purpose fall behind and close up shop.
Eventually the AI becomes the CEO, because it’s better at the job than the human CEO
is.
What does this ultimately mean?
It means eventually the entire world economy is run by AI corporations, and we have no
current way to prevent it, thus once it happens, we’re very close to losing control.
At some point, all we’ve got left is unplugging the power cables.
This same thinking can also be applied to entire countries.
AI may play a role in key national decisions, and indeed diplomacy.
Of course we will have some control over the outcome of artificial intelligence, but there’s
a surprising aspect of this that will also factor in.
Natural selection, or something very close to it, will play a role in shaping AI.
Artificial Intelligence will evolve.
Indeed, in some ways we already apply this.
Algorithms such as the one employed by youtube adapt and evolve according to what they learn
from your viewing habits, and thus recommend content it thinks you’ll like.
Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it does get better with use.
Where this may end up getting dangerous is that we’ve moved into territory where we
often don’t know exactly how an AI works, how it thinks so to speak, we just see the
output.
But with an evolving AI, that’s constantly changing.
Worse, AI evolution is many, many times faster than biological evolution.
There’s also survival of the fittest.
The AIs that provide the most benefit, especially financially, will be the fittest in comparison
with more limited or dumb AI.
Our AI company CEO for example may see things like stealing trade secrets like Col. Sander’s
fried chicken recipe as perfectly acceptable because the bottom line isn’t morals and
ethics, it’s profit.
That AI which profits most will surmount all others.
Pulling the power cord is the ultimate solution, but that’s assuming the AI that’s causing
you problems isn’t in another nation state or hasn’t been integrated into the power
grid so thoroughly that it’s no longer feasible to shut it down.
If you’re entirely dependent on that AI, you may not want to shut it off even if it’s
gotten out of hand.
Better to have a problematic AI than a complete collapse of society when you shut down the
power grid.
Perhaps the real key here is to manage the development of AI to avoid the unintended
consequences.
The problem is that we basically aren’t.
AI development investment has surpassed 100 billion dollars at this stage, and in a lot
of cases within the halls of the corporations developing them, secrecy remains the rule.
We don’t entirely know just what’s being developed, and how advanced it is.
One thing is clear however.
AI has one major unintended consequence that presents perhaps the most disturbing threat
of all.
That it will supplant us as the dominant intelligence on this world in the same way we dominate
the chimpanzees.
It doesn’t actually matter if an AI ever achieves true sapience like a human, they
may never be truly alive, just that it achieves superintelligence.
Once it’s smarter than a human, conscious or not, it’s at that point that we have
gone obsolete.
There was always the question of augmentation and how we could make ourselves superintelligent
with brain implants and the like which would keep AI in check, but the fact is, AI is developing
far more quickly than augmentation is.
As a result we run a high risk of obsolescence, above and beyond AI taking over increasing
amounts of jobs in surprising industries, but on an existential basis as well.
AI may not cause our extinction, but it may cause our overall marginalization on this
world.
And it very likely will provide many more unintended consequences along the way that
we do not yet foresee.
And herein is a potential solution to the Fermi Paradox.
It may simply be that all civilizations, including us, that would normally be space faring short
circuit it through the development of AI.
In this solution, the AI simply doesn’t allow the civilization to leave its home world.
It becomes a kind of self-imposed zoo hypothesis, and who’s to say, an AI may look at the
question of are we alone and conclude that it doesn’t matter.
Rather the more important thing is to make everyone else think they are alone, and not
risk detection by an alien civilization.
That which can’t see you, isn’t like to invade.
The AI may simply feel, for the humans, ignorance is bliss.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently thinking about things
that AI actually could be really bad at.
Something tells me that cooking will not be its fortee.
Fast food, maybe, industrial food yes, but high end restaurant food and solid home cooking
I’d be skeptical of, at least until they get a sense of taste and be sure to check
out my books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channels for
regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing
universe in which we live.