INCONVENIENT COMPLEXITIES
You must be the change you wish to see in the world? Mahatma Gandhi (Indian, lawyer, leader 1876-1948)
No, this is not about politics but about the Internet. Consider that the Internet Laws are part of a struggle for global power in a multi-polar world, even with recent shifts in protecting the users. It has worrisome implications as the Internet becomes increasingly intertwined with unstable geopolitics. ? Since 1989 the Internet has been full of surprises but nebulous in its goals, often not understood by the powerful players in government or this industry. The control of the Internet is fraught and existential.? Is it an oligarchy playground? Is it a tool for tyrants and illiberal populists? More than five billion people are using the Internet. It is a work in progress of vision, power, and purpose – how it is used depends on technologists and us.
Mustafa Suleyman’s book THE COMING WAVE, Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma clearly defines the pluses and negatives of the Internet, in this case, AI.? Sweeping everything in its path are some excerpts, which assist in understanding what THE WAVE is about.
Permeating humanity’s oral traditions and ancient writings is the idea of a giant wave sweeping everything in its path, leaving the world remade and reborn. Waves like this are a recurrent motif, framing the ebb and flow of history, great power struggles, and economic booms and busts. Human ingenuity is an astonishing thing. Only one other force is so omnipresent in this picture: biological life.? Everything that has entered the world since then flows from us.
Starting to crash around us is a new wave of technology. This wave is unleashing the power to engineer these two universal foundations: a wave of nothing less than intelligence and life. This coming wave is defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology. Together they will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus. And yet their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability, and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale. From where we stand today, it appears that containing this wave-that is controlling, curbing, or even stopping it - is not possible. The implications of these questions will ultimately affect everyone alive and every generation that follows us. If containing it is impossible, the consequences are dramatic and potentially dire. Progress in AI has been staggering.
Today, AI systems can perfectly recognize faces and objects. We take speech-to-text transcription and instant language translation for granted. AI can navigate roads and traffic; it can produce synthetic voices with uncanny realism and compose music of stunning beauty. AI has been climbing the ladder of cognitive abilities for decades, and it now looks set to reach human-level performance across a very wide range of tasks within the next three years, if not sooner.
AI is a powerful tool for extraordinary good but, like most forms of power, one fraught with immense dangers and ethical dilemmas. Beyond AI, a wider revolution is underway, with AI feeding a powerful, emerging generation of genetic technologies and robotics. Once matured these emerging technologies will spread rapidly, becoming cheaper, more accessible, and widely diffused throughout society. They will offer extraordinary new medical advances and clean energy breakthroughs, creating not just new businesses but new industries and quality of life improvements.
Alongside these benefits, AI, synthetic biology, and other forms of technology produce tail-risks on a deeply concerning scale. They could present an existential threat to nation-states-risks so profound they might disrupt or even overturn a current geopolitical order. They open pathways to immense AI-empowered cyberattacks, automated wars that could devastate countries, engineer pandemics, and a world subject to unexplainable forces. This will require huge levels of surveillance along with massive intrusions into private lives. Moreover, attempting to ban the development of new technologies is itself a risk: technologically stagnant societies are historically unstable and prone to collapse.
Pursuing or not pursuing new technologies is fraught with risk. The chances of muddling through a narrow path and avoiding one or the other outcome- techno-authoritarian dystopia on the one hand, openness-induced catastrophe on the other – grow smaller over time as the technology becomes cheaper, more powerful, and more pervasive and the risks accumulate. Even as we worry about their risks, we need the incredible benefits of the technologies of the coming wave more than ever before. The current discourse around technology ethics and safety is inadequate. Those driving technology’s creation must have the courage to predict-and take responsibility for - where it might take us in decades to come. What is required is a societal and political response, not merely individual efforts, but it needs to begin now. Heads-in-the-sand is the default ideology…we are on the cusp of the most important transformation of our lifetimes. Containment must be possible and needs worldwide, popular attention.
This is a thought-provoking current book about the great vision, positive and negative of AI. We should be aware of the great advances which are being made in technology; it moves fast by the hour, by the day. It also reminds us of the dangers! We are not prepared for this global challenge. This book guides us to be informed and alerted. It addresses this wave, containing technology, and ensuring that it always serves humanity means overcoming the pessimistic version. It means facing head-on the reality of what’s coming.?
The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.Socrates (Greek philosopher 470BC-399BC)