Apple’s voice assistant Siri, for example, is a form of AI. AI’s been in regular use for years, and it certainly doesn’t need a physical body to operate. It’s far more ubiquitous than the current spike in enthusiasm suggests. Books and movies tell us AI means robots - and they’re always presented as if they only exist in a galaxy far, far away.īut AI has little to do with robots. Until recently, most of us associated AI with science-fiction. Nonetheless, a growing chorus of other intellectuals, including the late Stephen Hawking, have predicted that the singularity will bring a change as dramatic as the initial emergence of human life. In 2014, Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, called the fear of machines a “Frankenstein complex.” Other heavy-hitters have drawn parallels between AI alarmism and religious extremism, doomsday preppers, and the need to populate Mars. Plenty still dismiss AI, and question the plausibility of a so-called singularity.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil defined the singularity as the time when the Law of Accelerating Returns - a rule that says the rate of evolutionary progress increases exponentially - reaches such an extreme that technological progress becomes effectively infinite. Mathematician and writer Vernor Vinge used it in a 1993 paper to describe the moment our technology’s intelligence exceeds our own. It describes a situation where, for better or worse, conventional thinking no longer applies. The competition unfolding among tech giants like Microsoft and Google will only accelerate the path toward what experts call the “singularity.”
With the rise of OpenAI’s viral language tool, ChatGPT, artificial intelligence has entered the public conversation like never before. PDF: I made a fancy PDF version of this post if you want to print or enjoy offline. This future is already here and the consequences will be extraordinary. What a person could spend a lifetime mastering, these bots can do in a second. This is a story about computers - computers that keep getting smarter because humans can’t stop making them smarter. Note: I wrote this because I can’t stop thinking about the future.
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