I have come the view that there life moves in a direction and there is nothing that can stop us getting to the novacene. A friend of mine asked if I had a crystal ball but I believe is easier to look at the broad sweep of human life and life on our planet.
I have started doing a project about scientific bunting which for length has a little triangular flag from every power of 10 dimension from 10-35, the Planck length to 10-28 the size of universe. At the smallest dimension lengths become quantum so that it doesn’t really mean anything and at the largest dimensions Space time is far from linear so the concept of a length no longer means very much. Happily in the middle from about 10-4 the thickness of hair to about 108 the furthest distance a human could walk in their lifetime is the realm of human existence.
Humans have been around for 2-300,000 years but as we look back on the traces our ancestors have left it is only in the last 50,000 years that there has been the start of an outpouring of human art and artifacts.
I visited Skara Brae last year in Orkney and it left a very strong impression. A little village of about 10 houses in the middle of a fabulous stone age culture lived for about 400 years 5000 year ago until abandoned perhaps in Tsunami. This resonates with me as my family have lived in Scotland for the last 350 years and we still tell stories of the family arriving and the artifacts they brought with them including a small cradle that both my children were rocked in. These little houses had stone beds, shelves and doors and it could remind of us know.
In the same way seeing the artifacts of the tables and chairs of the Pharaohs reminded us that we have similar furniture although perhaps not as fine. The ancient Egyptians gives one the idea that life for humans has gone on very much the same for millennia. As we have become richer the spread of houses tables and chairs has become more widespread through the population than just a small elite.
This sense of identification from now to very long ago gives me the strong sense of being human and that I am very similar to humans for the last 5000 years.
I have worked with computing all my life and have really enjoyed it from my first, an Elliot 903C to this gorgeous laptop. Since being at business school 25 years ago I have wondered if human intelligence would be exceeded. Rough calculations assumed that perhaps 10 petaflops would be about the right amount of computing power which then was long time in the future. Now it is in the past and it seems that perhaps it is not enough.
The general trend as typified by Moore’s law is that computing is getting both more powerful and cheaper. With various human endeavours you can seen gradually increasing and then surpassing human capabilities. For instance chess has been a great example with the greatest human falling before Deep Blue in 1997. Since then a number of examples have fallen. The one that we are right in the middle of is driving and it just seems a matter of time before super human driving skills are achieved.
Where does leave the future of humanity? I for one am not that worried about killer robots but I am worried about political control of our world.
While I was growing up, the world seemed a secure place but then latterly a couple of events have occurred in which I either didn’t take part or I was on the losing side. In Scotland, the land of my birth, a referendum was held on the future which was narrowly defeated. I was excluded from the process for living in England. In the UK, similarly divided the nation voted to leave the European Union. Both things that I have no control over and have bitterly divided people.
Some of this division is manufactured maliciously ie successful Russian propaganda to weaken the west and ferment divisions and distrust. Some is due to the rise of hand held phones that the population is now addicted to. You only have to walk up the steps from the Tube in London to see people glued to their phones.
Social media may well be part of the process of ghettoisation the promotes division.
In the future where will the political control come from with an electronic brain. Tech companies competing for supremacy and attention, dictators aiming to control their country or like North Korea state sponsored hacking for profit. The direction seems clear and it just seems a question of time before we get to the endpoint. That endpoint is when we have super human artificial general intelligence. At the moment we can see that it is a way off. The progress with driving, complex multidomain problem, gives a feel for how fast the process will be.
The direction and endpoint seem in little doubt. The only way to stop is to slow the rate down but apart from bombing semiconductor factories it is difficult to see how.
Increased taxation on AI might just slow down the better versions and leave the path open for worse AI.
There is difficulty in understanding how quick this process is likely to be. There is likely to be an instantaneous element to it but then the spread, consolidation of control will take a few years as new equipment is designed build and deployed.
In many ways this is like life and death. The great conceit of religion is to promise everlasting life when death is the only certainty and the end of humanity and the start of something new is part of the normal cycle rather than an exceptional event. In many ways this is like life and death. The great conceit of religion is to promise everlasting life when death is the only certainty and the end of humanity and the start of something new is part of the normal cycle rather than an exceptional event.