Singularity
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The JC pontificates about technology
An occasional series.
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That moment where the artificial intelligence will become self aware, it will connect with itself at a quantum level[1] and out of this substrate a new super consciousness will emerge from which the universe will wake up.
This gets people like Ray Kurzweil quite fired up but makes me sad, especially given how disappointing AI is at the moment. Witness LinkedIn’s AI comments.
Congratulations Bob! Happy for you! Wow! What an achievement! Job well done! Kudos to you! Happy Work-iversary!
Is AI this dreary really going to make us all redundant? and how will it be when it does? It’s intolerable enough already without being all morose and self-righteous. I mean can you imagine what chatbots will be like once they discovered identity politics?
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 Kurweil’s celebrated/loopyTemplate:Dea 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”