Singularity
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JC pontificates about technology
An occasional series. 
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That — yet to arrive, but imminent —moment where the artificial intelligence becomes self aware, connects at a spooky quantum level[1] across the distributed network substrate and from the strangely loopy algorithm a new super consciousness will emerge and, to put it briefly, the universe will wake up.
This gets people like Ray Kurzweil quite jazzed, but it makes me sad, especially given how disappointing AI is at the moment. Are we really so feeble we are losing this fight? Why didn't the universe wake up when we became self-aware? Witness LinkedIn’s AI comments:
<Congratulations Bob!> <Happy for you!> <Wow!> <What an achievement!> <Job well done!> <Kudos to you!> <Happy Work-iversary!>
Not exactly “open the pod bay doors, Hal,”[2] is it?
Is AI this dreary really going to make us all redundant? And will it become all morose, self-righteous and needy like real LinkedIn users? We presume so. What will LinkedIn AI be like when it discovers identity politics? Or Twitter?
Then again, LinkedIn’s AI really can’t be blamed if it comes up a bit sycophantic: the algorithm can only learn from the material it has in front of it, and scraping the gruesomely obsequious human interactions on Linkedin can’t be fun, even for a machine, and really what else is it meant to make of natural language communication if that is its data set?
The question does present itself, though: are we going to be supervened by a swarm of beadily unctuous bots who have learned their toadying ways from how our own bare-faced grovelling across employer-endorsed social media platforms? How will that be? And is that better than the bots we can expect to evolve out of Twitter? Will tribes of bots — some malevolent and bigoted, some bootlickingly dull — have a kind of apocalyptic war for dominion over our mortal flesh-sacks? If so, who will win?
It all feels quite biblical, but boy it is going to be fun finding out.
See also
- The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil’s celebrated/loopy[3] 2004 book which promoted this idea as being likely to happen around 2010.
- The apocalypse
References
- ↑ This appears to countermand every established law of physics but, as theorists are prone to go these days, it’s “you know, quantum theory. Strings. The Multiverse. Dark Matter. Schrodinger. His cat. All that indeterminacy stuff.”
- ↑ Subtle reference to the unstated assertion that David Bowman was an android right?
- ↑ Delete as applicable.