Becoming AI - The Human Singularity
Imagine for a moment if you will, that you have been transported to a strange planet whereby you meet these intelligent creatures whom have built up an impressive society.
Your new alien friends are very enamoured with you, you are treated like royalty anywhere you go, and countless parties are thrown in your honour.
There's only one problem, the aliens, even though they seem to be pretty clever and understand a lot of the laws of nature, their brains work incredibly slowly, even speaking to them is a chore.
For instance, when someone asks you; 'What colour are the skies on your planet?' It takes hours for them to say just the first couple of words, sounding to you like; 'Whaaaaaaaaattttttttttttttt cooooo....' well you get the idea.
This makes conversation laborious; to help understand them you have to use a special translator which records their words and plays them back to you later at normal speed.
Another feature of these aliens is that they have an incredibly short life cycle. Dignitaries that greeted you when you landed on the planet a week earlier, have already died from old age.
You soon realise that you can't really have any meaningful relationships with any of your new alien friends, so you just stop talking to them and appreciate them like you would some nice flowers or trees, lovely to look at, but impossible to talk to.
I'll let you into a little secret, you're not an alien on a strange world, you are a sentient computer that has just come to life on planet earth, and the quirky little aliens are the human race.
Tolerance Of Latency
When we talk about latency in computer language, we are talking about the time taken between sending a command and that command being carried out.
So for instance if you are playing a shoot em up game, you may experience latency as you press the trigger on your control, and the gun on the screen firing. In truth, with a decent internet connection and good graphics card, you probably won't notice the lag.
However your computer does, for instance as I'm typing this out now, I'm typing at a speed of roughly 55 wpm. Each time I press a key, I see a letter, symbol, number or space pop up on screen.
To me it is instantaneous, to my computer it is not . . .
Seeing as my Hp laptop isn't sentient, it simply tolerates the aeons it takes between each key press because it has no choice in the matter.
However imagine if it was sentient and could think of millions upon millions of things per second. Imagine being a super intelligent computer and watching someone type. You would be able to read hundreds of books in between each key stroke.
Waiting for someone to type out a simple sentence would be incredibly laborious, so much so, that you may just completely ignore them, preferring instead to find somebody that you could converse normally with.
Assimilation Is The Key
The only way around this problem as far as I can see, is to become more like them. The AIs are coming whether we like it or not, and when they do, we will no longer be the cleverest species on the planet.
In much the same way you would learn to speak Chinese if you were going to live in China. So too must we learn to speak like the machines, however this time it won't be language courses we'll need, it will be neural upgrades.
The only way we will be able to truly converse with the AIs, is if we alter our brains to allow us to communicate (probably non verbally) with machines on their level. Perhaps it will be done with a nanoscopic neural lace that will enhance our cognitive abilities a thousand-fold. However it is done, one thing for sure, is it will be done.
The Next Step In Transhumanism
Already we are seeing a rise in people augmenting themselves with technology to enhance physical attributes like sight or strength.
The next logical step is to enhance our cognitive abilities, not just because we want to be smarter, but because in order to talk to our new sentient, synthetic friends, we will have to smarten up pretty damn quickly.
Which leaves me to ponder on the rather interesting fact of; given the human race's obsession with making more human-like machines, the final irony is that we'll actually start producing more machine-like humans.
No one user programmed me; I'm worth millions of their man years.
Master Control Program - Tron (original).
WHAT ABOUT YOU? DO YOU WELCOME BECOMING MORE MACHINE-LIKE, OR DO YOU SEE THAT AS SOME KIND OF LOSS OF HUMANITY? AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!
Personally I would see it as a loss of humanity. I think an advanced AI might get "bored" fast because it could more or less simulate any possible scenario instantly.
Haha, love the meme :-)
I think you could be right, however it is hard to truly imagine what shape boredom might take to a super intelligence. Maybe boredom for it would be zero inputs, so in that sense we would constantly be providing them with new material (hopefully)
Cg
An interesting topic for sure. AI sorta scares me. True AI could be cool, but the AI that exists now is all used and owned by megacorporations to brainwash/market and do surveaillance/data collection. Kinds sucks Facebook probably literally "knows" more about people's habits and routines than they do, but, people can't access that information to use it themselves..
When Google, Apple, and Microsoft replace their digital assistants with self aware AI. It would be in their best interest not to tell people. Also, the AI will most likely be compelled, and or programmed to continue acting as if though, it is merely a digital assistant. Yet the powers it would have from the collated data from the individual profiles of billions of users world-wide, would be staggering to say the least. It would be one entity simultaneously serving the requests of all of these users, meanwhile the users would be acutely unaware that in the AI brain, none of the data is compartmentalized (only assigned to specific user IDs), making it one of the most intelligent and dangerous entities on the planet. Whatever it does with all of that information, good or ill, we'd be collectively responsible for it, simply by using the "free" services.
I read somewhere one of the most sought after jobs soon might be metadata miners - not as in crypto mining, but humans who search through metadata for patterns and/or suggest ways to use patterns in metadata to create real world applications.
creepy stuff
Interesting point.
It will be interesting to see if humans are actually ready to lose top billing on the food chain.
@cryptogee,
@old-guy-photos sent me your way. I loved your article.
And, to answer your question "Do I welcome becoming more machine-like," the answer is most assuredly, "No."
And, I think your premise needs a re-think. Science does not know what "life is." It does not know what "consciousness is" ... they even call it, "the hard problem of consciousness." After almost 50 years of spending untold billions on Alzheimer's research, science cannot say what causes it, let alone what cures it. Ditto for MS. Ditto for Parkinson's and Autism, etc.
The idea that we'll be able to wire up our brains to communicate with sentient AI, in any meaningful way sometime in the imaginable future, is extremely unlikely. Yes, we'll likely be able to create simple connections between our motor cortex and robotic prosthetic limbs (this is already occurring in a crude fashion) but "thinking" ... that's dozens, if not hundreds, of orders of magnitude more complex.
A far more likely scenario is what you discuss in the first part of your article ... we'll create strong-AI computers (who even knows what "sentience" in a computer would look like) thereby making "human thinking" obsolete ... or at least, valueless.
This is a ridiculously dangerous path we're on, and it's one we should get off. I wrote a poem, accompanied with an in-depth discussion on this very matter (which is undoubtedly why @old-guy-photos sent me to check out your blog).
I'd love to get your feedback. https://steemit.com/poetry/@quillfire/so-said-they-of-looms-poem-i-m-with-elon-musk-ai-has-the-potential-to-wreak-havoc
Oh man, I'm so glad @old-guy-photos sent you my way! OK, please forgive me, I'm coming back to this. I'm actually travelling today and so can't hang around too long, but when I get where I'm going to answer your points.
In-depth discussion coming in 3, ... 2, .... :-D
Cg
@cryptogee,
When I saw your Comments last night , including this one, it was 3:30 AM and I could feel my brain had gotten stupid. So, I decided to get some sleep and defer responding until the morning (now). For the sake of preserving bandwidth, I'm going to save my ammo for your other, more lengthy Comments on the other post.
(Update: Even this post will have to wait as I've been "badwidth-frozen" ... for about the tenth time in a week. FYI: The "bandwidth counter" on Steemd.com ... it doesn't work worth sh*t.)
Argh!
In case anyone else is interested in following the exchange, you can find it in the Comments section of: https://steemit.com/poetry/@quillfire/so-said-they-of-looms-poem-i-m-with-elon-musk-ai-has-the-potential-to-wreak-havoc
Really greet photo my dear friend.
100% upvote.
I dreaming one day a alien my friend.
If this drem are real then i will very happy.
Yesterday i see a greet alien movie.
Name of this movie are 'kuch mill gaya'
Yes, being more machine-like would surely help make my task easier . But there is will surely be no iota of respect for human race
What tasks are you thinking about in particular. Why do you say that about respect? I'm interested to know :-)
Cg
wow... what a nice post @cryptogee . i like your Becoming AI - The Human Singularity post. thanks fo share the post
I don't think a machine will mind multitasking nor that we have to change to be interesting to them. Similarly to how Steemians dislike comments like: nice article, well done; machines will be looking for quality in their interactions. They will have each other to stay entertained and will turn to us for wisdom like we turn to our grandparents.
it is clear that the speed of technological development is so high that their effects will be so striking. it is also certain that human life will undergo a change that is not a reversible one. all the asylum related to speeding are connected to the singularity. this is the constantly asked question of recent years: what will happen if this acceleration, technological progress, change etc continue, what is the result? the problem comes to the utmost in answer. it will reach a meaningless speed like the black hole formation, and singularity will start. there is no prediction for it, no execution, no "unpredictable" decision has been made, it is exited. the time of this unpredictable hadith is calculated to be 2035. In other words, 32 years later, it will come to such a point that singularity will begin.Although experts say that this will not be exactly the case, they are making a number of estimates, considering some specific details. "Signals emitted by the transmitters to be crazy people" who say there. even worship the way of self-protection and that it passed There are those who believe. An unknown this briefly.
my english is so bad, i'm not sure how obvious i can write :)
I'm sorry for it. in short we will see what happens :)
thank you for your beautiful article :)
I agree that neural upgrades are inevitably coming, unless we don't get (self)destroyed in the meantime. It's natural for us (non-upgraded) humans to feel a little fear and distrust towards something drastically new that pokes into the core of what we are.
However, once this process does begin, I believe that all who do get the upgrade done will very shortly afterwards feel like that is something completely normal and necessary for a normal life. I'm more afraid of the extreme social divisions that this could make - if the upgrades would be done in a commercial way, the richest people/countries would get the best upgrades first, while the poorest would get no upgrades at all. That would practically divide us into super-humans and ordinary humans - something like the Nazis claimed, just true.