History is Not Inevitable But a Series of Contingencies Waiting to Happen
French Philosopher Michel Foucault, considered one of the most celebrated thinkers of the late 20th century, writes in his book’s famous last sentence: “Man will be erased, like a face drawn in the sand, at the edge of the sea.” capturing the uncertainty and optimism of our time.
Foucault seems to indicate it is not about our demise. But that someone else may come along, and draw a better face in the sand, in a different style. In many ways, his book The Order of Things articulates that history is a series of contingencies waiting to happen. That is a series of unrelated scientific developments, incidentally and independently built upon one another creating a spark, leading to a cascade of technological innovations that shapes and changes our world forever. He might not have foreseen “The Singularity”, but remarkably, his prediction was mere decades from the time of his writing and The Singularity becoming into being.
The Singularity is the ultimate product of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) where AGI needs large-scale, fidelitous training data to be useful. This takes time to materialize. The significant technical challenges with training data and its associated fidelity, and the inherently lengthy, difficult, yet painful process in scientific development and innovation feasibility require a large pool of wide-ranging brain power, and a sizable capital investment concentration. The Singularity may not become a reality anytime soon, at least, not in our life time. Yet, The Singularity is nearer and coming.
[Note: The Worlds I See by Dr. Fei Fei Li is a prime example where her independent, unrelated work incidentally accelerated AGI development, illustrating that history is not inevitable but a series of contingencies waiting to happen.]
The old is dead and the new is to be born?
Unlike the Industrial Revolution where human developed/created tools that other human can use to make our lives better, to make people richer, collectively transforming society and economy for the better as a whole; AGI is not a tool, it is an agent. That is the risk we must reckon with. At stake, any single actor with money, whether an individual, or a rich, but small police nation-state with a dedicated sovereign fund controlled by a single person like the UAE, can enter the AI supremacy game for global domination at the expense of all of us. [Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us by Gary Marcus shows the byzantine complexity.]
In contrast to the nuclear age, America may not be able to hold on to the technological supremacy in AI as we may hubristically believe. Yet, similarly to the Industrial Revolution, we are at an inflection point in the technological advancement leap of the Information Age.
The Giants in the 1500s, whose chutzpah initiated the spark that fueled the Industrial Revolution in Europe and spread to the United States, enabled our modern-day comfort. A couple of many examples are Galileo who dares to speak truth in opposition to the Catholic Church teachings; and Peter Ramus who boldly declares in his 1500s thesis “Everything Aristotle says is wrong”, and that his followers are frauds. He even attacked Cicero. [Peter Ramus’s Attack on Cicero by James J. Murphy is a good start to see why the Industrial Revolution failed in China.]
So, the question before us is: Do we collectively have the audacity to declare the old is dead and the new is to be born where an agent we created works to benefit us all? That is, how to make an agent with its own faculty work for us.
[While we are at it, be mindful of the risk trade-off that democracy, and the rule of law absolutely benefit the masses—little guys us. The so-called broligarchs of the Information Age, in our time, want absolutely zero limits on their power at the expense of the masses by methodically and completely controlling money, politics, technology, and land. It is a perfect storm.]
#TheSingularity
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