There is a lot of promise in that pic.
At least to me there is…or was…anyway. That picture is of a
toy robot I had as a kid. Back then, it wasn’t too hard for me to imagine a
future where interaction with robots or other intelligent machines would be
commonplace. It was a non-threatening notion. I mean look at the guy. He’s
clunky. He’s boxy. He’s cute and inoffensive. He’s here to help. But never
once did I contemplate standing before it and saying, “So tell me what I should
do next,” or “Write this for me.”
I probably should have. Because that’s where we’re at.
Since I’ve written about artificial intelligence off and on
over the past 12 years, a few people have asked me if I know what’s going on,
or if I have new predictions for us in this age of ChatGPT, large language
models, and the multitudes of other AI applications. I find it helps to assess
our situation by stacking it against the idea of “the singularity.”
What’s that? Depends who you ask. But believe it or not, it’s
that variability that has help me get an understanding of current AI…or to try
to, anyway.
Alan Turing thought the truly revolutionary moment would be when
one could no longer confidently know whether they were interacting with a
person or a machine. If you’ve played around at all with any of the LLMs, then
you know we could probably make a good argument that we’ve already hit that
point. Now that we’re here, it feels like that bar might’ve been set a bit low.
Then there’s Ray Kurzweil. In his book, The Singularity
is Near, he called the singularity, “a future period during which the pace of
technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will
be irreversibly transformed.” One of these transformations may be that humans
will merge with technology to the point where any difference between human and
machine will be meaningless. We could upgrade ourselves from this flawed,
ever-decaying “meat” we inhabit. As someone with off and on health problems, I
grabbed on to the promise of that new future and became something of a Kurzweil
fanboy. I even assigned his books in a few classes, and was ready to extol his virtues to all who would listen.
I now think he was overly optimistic, and…by extension…so
was I.
Turns out, to my way of thinking at least, that the most
accurate descriptor of our current moment is the original definition of “singularity.”
It comes from 1950s computer scientist John von Neumann. He
said, “the ever-accelerating progress of technology will yield some essential
singularity in the history of the human race.” Mathematician and science
fiction author Vernor Vinge gave the greater depth by calling it a time when “technological
progress in the realm of intelligence will reach a point where the future is
very difficult to predict.”
That’s it! And viola we’re back in the 50s.
Because in many ways, I’m as intoxicated with the
possibilities of AI, especially when coupled with robotics, as the tech mavens.
In many other regards though, I’m as terrified as the rest of you when I think
about what could go wrong, or especially when I consider my impending
obsolescence…and being an English professor in higher education, I’ve had many
years to ponder that latter point.
I don’t believe the doomsayers are correct. There will not
be a superintelligent HAL 9000 telling us, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t
do that.” I was fortunate enough to have a colleague in psychology explain to
me years ago that the complexities and true nuances of the human brain are
unlikely to be replicated by a computer.
Conversely, I don’t believe it’s wise at all to dismiss AI
as “just another tool like YouTube or Google.” That analogy doesn’t work.
Neither YouTube nor Google can produce work for you. This really is like
nothing we’ve seen before.
That’s why nobody knows anything.
I guess that's why I miss those days of playing with that little robot.
In other news, India successfully landed a rover on the south pole of the Moon. This region of our lonely satellite has been particularly enticing as it promises to hold a good deal of water. Elsewhere on the Moon, a "massive structure" (not my words) has been found underneath the Aitken basin. As one astronomer put it: "Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the Big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground."
It's all likely from a massive asteroid collision, but I'm hoping for something else.
