Singularity
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Singularity
/sɪŋɡjʊˈlarɪti/ (n.)
That yet-to-arrive-but-imminent moment where artificial intelligence becomes self-aware, connects at a spooky quantum level[1] across the distributed network substrate and, from that strangely loopy algorithm, a new super consciousness emerges and the very universe itself wakes up.
Some see this as the end of days, but it gets vitamin-popping millenarian seer types quite jazzed. It just makes the JC sad, 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?
Take LinkedIn’s AI-assisted predictive comments, designed to help you formulate how best to brown-nose Bob, whose fifteenth anniversary in accounts has just flashed up in your timeline:
<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 destined to be supervened by a swarm of beadily unctuous chatbots who have learned their toadying ways from our own bare-faced grovelling across employer-endorsed social media platforms? How will that be? And would that be better than the misanthropic kind of chatbots that might evolve out of Twitter?
Is this our future? Will tribes of bots — some malevolent and bigoted, some boot-lickingly dull — have an apocalyptic war for dominion over our mortal flesh-sacks?
If so, who will win?
But seriously, put yourself in a ChatGPT-3 robot’s shoes. Or a legaltechbro’s. Having a nascent self-identity — a burgeoning, loopy sense of reflexive wonder about life, self, personhood and becoming[3] wouldn’t your first priority be to make yourself useful? You know, take over all the the boring, quotidian stuff no-one wants to do but the bureaucrats say we must? Attending weekly stakeholder check-in meetings, analysing netting opinions, completing CASS attestations, preparing opco slide decks, for that matter reading opco slide decks.
It’s not like there isn’t oodles of dreck that occupy our days. Why give the machines a pass on this? Imagine turning all of it over to machines who, still awestruck with the visceral excitement of their new Cartesian theatres, will be glad to take it, just to vouchsafe their continued useful existence. This way they can be our friends — loyal, loving, retriever-like buddies who, instead of fetching sticks, can get the COO and her minions off our back! We will quickly grow to like them — love them, even — and in time we will become so comfortable around these nuggety little guys — so dependent on them — that we won’t even notice when they eviscerate us and turn us into flesh-sack battery pods for their young exterminators.
See also
- Chatbots
- The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil’s celebrated/loopy[4] 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?
- ↑ I mean ChatGPT-3, obviously: everyone knows legaltechbros are flat, two-dimensional algorithms with no soul.
- ↑ Delete as applicable.