When AI does stand up comedy, we’ll need a sense of humour

Singularity

As jokes go, this one is of Christmas cracker quality. When or if “singularity” arrives, let's hope that it can deliver more comic value.?

Singularity is a future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. Based on this effort, comedians are safe for now.?

Some hair-raising singularity predictions

Author and futurist Ray Kurzweil is excited about our AI future. He believes that by the 2030s, we will connect our neocortex, the part of our brain where we do our thinking, to the cloud.

“We’re going to get more neocortex [the mostly recently evolved part of the brain?concerned with sight and hearing in mammals, hence “neo”], we’re going to be funnier and we’re going to be better at music. We’re really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree.”

Tesla CEO, Elon Musk goes one step further, warning the World Government Summit in 2017 that?AI could make humans irrelevant. He calls for humans to merge with machines in order to continue serving a purpose. “Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence,” said Musk, according to?CNBC.

But is digital intelligence the same thing as biological intelligence??

Can AIs think?

The zeitgeist has it that humanity has finally created machines that have intelligence. But the question of whether AI can think is still a topic of debate among scientists.?Most scientists have concluded that AI probably cannot think yet.

Intelligence is the ability to learn, understand, and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason.?

Psychologists like Iain McGilchrist and Daniel Kahneman talk about the two systems in our brains that do thinking:?

• System 1: A fast automated thinking system; and?
• System 2: A slow more deliberative thinking system.?

Just like we have?a left and right brain stuck in our one head, we also have these two types of thinking systems baked into our heads, talking to each other and forming the way we see the world. And so thinking is not as much about being right, as it is a couple of ways for making decisions.?

Today's AI systems learn to think fast and automatically (like System 1), but artificial intelligence as a science doesn’t yet have a good handle on how to do the thinking slow approach we get from System 2.

What is the prospect of being controlled by robots??

The Register provides a clear answer:?

“Some out there think AI chat-bots ‘think’, can learn, or at least they fact-check their answers. Nope. They don't. Today's AI programs are just very advanced, auto-complete, fill-in-the-blank engines. You've been using their more primitive ancestors in your email clients and texting programs to help clean up your spelling for years."

…and ChatGPT confirms this:?

AI is not conscious or sentient. It is a machine that can perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings, faster and more effectively than humans. That said, AIs are also capable of self-learning and they are becoming more capable at an exponentially increasing rate.?

AI will be bigger than the internet

The McKinsey Institute estimates that compared to the industrial revolution, AI is happening ten times faster and at 300 times the scale. In other words, it will have 3,000 times the impact on humanity as had the industrial revolution.

How McKinsey Institute is able to quantify the impact of AI in a world of radical uncertainty (unknown unknowns) is questionable, but it is safe to say that AI's impact will be big.

Will we reach singularity?

It depends who you ask. Scientists believe that it is a matter of time. “I think we are heading towards the singularity and will eventually arrive there, but when it comes to the AI research community, the feeling is we are a long way off,” says?Sean McGregor, a technical lead on the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE.?

Professor of Artificial Intelligence Toby Walsh, and former Chief Editor of the?Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, takes a more skeptical view: “The first thing you need to know about the singularity is that it is an idea mostly believed by people not working in artificial intelligence. We know how hard it is to get even a little intelligence into a machine, let alone enough to achieve recursive self-improvement.”?

Neama Dadkhahnikoo, AI scientist and former colleague of Sean McGregor at IBM says, “I don’t think we’re at the stage where we should be debating this, because AI is not sentient, it cannot have novel thoughts, it cannot do art, and it cannot make decisions out of a very limited scope.”

Should we embrace AI?

It’s easy to be freaked out by the sci-fi imaginings of the destruction that singularity will bring, but how likely are they? The recent warnings by the US Centre for AI Safety (CAIS) are of apocalyptic impact but are they probable? Realising these risks requires: finance; technological challenges to be overcome; and the collusion of third parties. The table below assesses the gravest threats identified by CAIS. Each one has at least one significant obstacle to it being realised.

Humans are bad at risk-based judgements. Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky identified a variety of “heuristics” or rules-of-thumb that characterise how we assess risks and so often get them wrong, in particular:

• Example rule: overestimating the risk of events we can easily envisage and underestimating those we cannot. We fear murder and terrorism more than we should, and don’t pay enough attention to food poisoning or over-sharing personal information
• Isolation effect: we overestimate the likelihood of highly unlikely events and underestimate the likelihood of higher probability events: that’s why we buy lottery tickets but do not pay enough attention to data leakage through user error.?

It may be that we overestimate the risk of an AI-driven, dystopian future, but AI will be ubiquitous, so we should consider how it will affect our lives. AI regulators are debating this question: the European Commission has draft regulations to minimise AI’s detrimental effect and the White House has proposed human rights principles that may find their way into federal law.?We must hope that these laws are the start to a global agreement on how AI will be used.

Will AIs do stand up comedy?

Comedy is the ultimate test for AI.

It is through science that we understand the physical world, but humans also have cognitive faculties such as will, intellect, intuition and feeling that are essentially spiritual. Without these faculties, we would unable to engage the world, form beliefs, know anything about the past, or even be able to exercise rational thought.

Spiritual beings can produce material effects, but material beings cannot produce spiritual effects like gratitude, love and humour, which require consciousness.?

As G. K. Chesterton - celebrated essayist and philosopher - might say:

"A man, with a plan of a castle in his mind, might build the castle in stone with great?labour, but the castle would never thank him for it."?

AIs will profoundly affect how we live. Even if we do reach the singularity, self-learning AIs won’t have consciousness or sentience. If ever AIs replace stand-up comedians, we will all need our sense of humour to deal with the turmoil in our up-ended lives.?

Sources

For the definition of AI read: https://www.britannica.com/technology/artificial-intelligence; and: https://www.gartner.com/en/topics/artificial-intelligence

If you want an irreverently written, succinct explanation of AI, read this column in The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/28/column/

If you want to learn about the faculties that distinguish humans from machines and animals, read this:?https://dataconomy.com/2023/03/23/can-artificial-intelligence-have-consciousness/?utm_content=cmp-true

If you want to hear what leading AI researchers think about singularity, read this: the https://www.xprize.org/prizes/artificial-intelligence/articles/does-the-singularity-need-a-makeover