Is the Human Race Making Itself Unnecessary?
AI could mean the first aliens we meet won’t be from another planet. They’ll be the ones we create.
“The first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.” — I.J. Good, Computer Scientist, 1960
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On May 30, 2023, 350 big thinkers and business leaders in the world of artificial intelligence announced that AI posed an existential threat to you, me, and the rest of humanity. Remember that date because they may be right. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war …” — that’s the way they put it in their one-sentence statement. Even earlier than that, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking (before his death) all said essentially the same thing. [1]
Hawking put it this way. “Humans, limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded by A.I.” This past June even the pope chimed in on the subject during the G7 Summit, asking nations to “safeguard a space for proper human control over the choices made by artificial intelligence programs.”
All this concern is directly related to the seemingly sudden arrival of software like Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Co-Pilot, and a herd of other apps made possible using Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI, all of them creating software that behave with increasingly human-like wit, insight and intelligence.
Calling out these dangers is a nice start, but where is the follow up? There seems to be a massive disconnect in the AI community. On the one hand, people like Sam Altman at Open AI, Demis Hassabis at Google DeepMind, and Dario Amodei of Anthropic cry out for restraint, but the companies and universities that are driving much of the AI revolution keep accelerating the very thing they say they fear.
Why? Well, money doesn’t hurt. Not long ago, Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy, fearful that pundits might think the company was lagging, said in a 2023 quarterly earning’s meeting, that AI was going to be “at the heart of what we do.” [2] Elon Musk recently expanded the AI wars to go after Google’s Gemini Chatbot and Open AI’s ChatGPT, and has created his own AI known as Grok.[3] And he says a future version of Tesla won’t really be a car company, but an AI company.
Meanwhile, silicon chip manufacturer NVIDIA is changing the world and has seen its profits skyrocket past 628% over the past year because it is the world leader in creating the hardware that makes most AI software possible.[4] Other big chip manufacturers like Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Apple are hopping on board as quickly they can.[5]
Evolution Doing What It Does — The Power and Unpredictability of Emergent Properties
This make-all-the-money-you-can-now approach to artificial intelligence has apparently blinded the community to the way AIs could take charge of the human race, crazy as that may sound. There’s a term scientists have for this. They call it “emergent properties,” and it is the most likely way that machines become our competitors rather than our friends.
Emergent properties (or sometimes “traits” or “behaviors”) are not new, but they are powerful. The great thinker John Stewart Mill was one of the first to explore the question 150 years ago, and scientists have been investigating the behavior in other fields for decades, from cosmology to biology and meteorology.
The style of “emergent behaviors” is always the same. It arises when an immense pool of information interacts in seemingly random ways to create something entirely unknown and more complex than the parts that made it possible in the first place. Snowflakes and crystals are emergent. Stars, galaxies and blackholes are too, having somehow arisen from the mysterious forces and massive data that the Big Bang set in motion; so are the complexities of beehives and ant hills. Emergence is what was behind the arrival of untold random molecules in earth’s early oceans which then somehow developed into replicating DNA. And the life DNA made possible in turn lead to the billions of interacting neurons in the hominid brains that brought human consciousness into the world. Now, ironically, the very creativity that has given us AI is itself an emergent trait. If it were not for these punctuated evolutionary leaps, no living thing, including you and me, would exist.
Dangers
What makes Generative AI (or LLMs) dangerous is that they are all about data. They train themselves on immense amounts of it, and that makes them a breeding ground for emergent behavior. Version one of ChatGPT initially drew on 117 million parameters to behave somewhat intelligently — parameters being the information drawn from millions upon millions of human-created articles, books and anything else the models use to train up. Version 2.0 used 1.5 billion parameters, and GPT-3 tapped 175 billion parameters. These are huge, rapidly increasing numbers, but minuscule to what is coming. And as with behaviors like DNA or ecosystems or the neurons that make up the human brain, there is an element of evolution involved. Just as, over time, a species either adapts to a changing environment, or dies, if an AI finds information that doesn’t improve its goal, it discards it, sharpening what remains to better summarize your meetings or learn to drive a car.
Because one of the purposes of AIs is to act human so they can easily help and relate to us by drawing on trillions of parameters, AI’s may well develop a mind of their own, not unlike we did when billions of interacting neurons made us self-aware. Science fiction? Don’t count on it. The day a conscious machine arrives in the world, we humans will become instantly irrelevant, or as the physicist Vernor Vinge once put it to NASA scientists, the day “we have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”
Advantages
Despite its dangers, Generative AI can also do enormous good, and we wouldn’t want to eliminate it even if we could (we can’t). It is arguably the most powerful technology to emerge in human history. Several months ago Google’s DeepMind solved one of biology’s biggest problems when it predicted the structure of nearly every protein known to science and did it in 18 months. Previously it took scientists years to unlock even one protein. A massive breakthrough in the treatment of all diseases will likely follow, not to mention a much deeper understanding of the human body.[6]
Meanwhile AI is accelerating the repair and amplification of the human mind by developing devices like Stentrode and Neuralink that can talk directly to the brain. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Meta and Apple are all investing in what is now known as neurotech, something they see as the next AI frontier.[7] These are massively important breakthroughs, and many more will follow, all of it accelerated by the rapid development of increasingly powerful LLMs.
What Next?
Now that pandora has leapt entirely out of the box, where will it all lead? Keeping these tools in the service of the human race rather than the other way around, won’t be easy. In my own fiction and non-fiction, I have imagined one of two paths to the future.
The first is that we become caught in our own crosshairs. AI wins because we increasingly (and let’s admit it, greedily) upgrade the technology until it outsmarts us. ChatGPT and Gemini are the ancestral parents of these creations. These machines may not be particularly angry, greedy or violent like the Terminator scenarios we’ve seen, but they will quickly be infinitely faster, smarter and more successful than us. This is what futurist Ray Kurzweil, and others call the “singularity.” Just as we swept Neanderthals into the evolutionary trash bin 30,000 years ago, we will become the newNeanderthals as the machines leave our biological wetware in the dust. They might even, as robotics visionary Hans Moravec has surmised, create quite a nice world for us, a kind of verdant zoo. But they, not us, will be on top of the food chain, and we will have become nothing more than a bridge from one species, and world, to another: the ironic implements of our own demise.
But there is a second path. In this one we amplify ourselves and meld the best AI has to offer with the human mind and body. Neuralink and Stentrode are the current and clunky ancestors of these advances; one in which we eventually incorporate mostly nanotechnologies into our “selves” to create amplified versions. Which path will we choose? The first relegates us to insignificance, or worse, extinction. The second augments us in a kind of symbiotic relationship with AI.
If that happens, we will have evolved into a new kind of creature, not Homo sapiens, but Cyber sapiens. (Cyber comes from the Greek word for steersman or pilot.) Though we will look human, we will be part machine. Part molecular, part digital. This may smack of science fiction but think for a moment about the advances in nanotechnology, where invisible machines are already capable of being injected into the human body.[8]
The point is, by maintaining a short-term view of the world as we too often have, we, not the machines, will enable the emergence that undoes us. Better to put our actions where our fears are now. Since large corporations are not likely to put on the brakes (to be fair, not really their job), nation-states must create a worldwide body that develops political and legal systems that will keep rampant AI advances under control, not unlike the way the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) keeps an eye on nuclear power. Too often we’ve made ourselves the bug on the future’s windshield. This time, maybe, it’s time for change, before it’s too late.
Chip Walter is a National Geographic Explorer and author of five literary science books published in eight languages. His sixth book, and first novel, Doppelganger — An Orphan, a Prodigy, a Murder, dramatically explores with the future of Artificial Intelligence.
Sources:
[1]Scientists: AI Is an Existential Threat- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/technology/ai-threat-warning.html & https://observer.com/2015/08/stephen-hawking-elon-musk-and-bill-gates-warn-about-artificial-intelligence/
[2] Amazon Working on AI — https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-teams-working-generative-ai-ceo-says-andy-jassy-2023-8
[3] Musk Expands AI Wars — https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/17/technology/chatbot-xai-code-musk.html
[4] NVIDIA Earnings: 600% Profit Explosion — https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/05/22/nvidia-earnings-stock-rallies-as-ai-giant-reports-600-profit-explosion/
[5] Apple Developing AI Chips — https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/apple-is-developing-ai-chips-for-data-centers-seeking-edge-in-arms-race-0bedd2b2)
[6] AI Solves Biology’s Biggest problem — https://www.newscientist.com/article/2330866-deepminds-protein-folding-ai-cracks-biologys-biggest-problem/
[7] Neurotechnology Next AI Frontier — https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-tech-sees-neurotechnology-as-its-next-ai-frontier-100022978.html.
[8] Tiny Swimming Robots — https://www.science.org/content/article/tiny-swimming-robot-can-think-itself
3. The Best of Jeeves and Wooster by P. G. Wodehouse - Comedy
P.G. Wodehouse, the master of British humor, captured the world's imagination with his bumbling, empty-headed, man-about-town Bertie Wooster and his faithful butler Jeeves. Here are eleven of Wodehouse's short stories as well as two hilarious novels, all hilarious. This collection even contains the one-and-only story narrated by Jeeves himself! If you love classic dry, British humor and send ups of the upper classes, give this book to yourself or a friend, but buy it. If you enjoy audio books, I highly recommend reading the book that way. Narrator Kevin Theis brilliantly captures all Wodehouse's many amusing characters perfectly.
4. Here Is New York by E. B. White - History/Commentary
Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, E. B. White's stroll around Manhattan remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America's foremost literary figures. The New York Times has named Here is New York one of the ten best books ever written about the metropolis, and The New Yorker calls it "the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city." There’s nothing else to say except few writers have mastered the English language better than White. What an eye for detail and human insight. Classic.
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Jot your own notes, thoughts, and recommendations on your own travel adventures in this beautiful Machu Picchu Spiral Traveler's Journal. Available in the Vagabond-Adventure store. |
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Jot your own notes, thoughts, and recommendations on your own travel adventures in this beautiful Machu Picchu Spiral Traveler's Journal. Available in the Vagabond Adventure store. Support of our store also helps support our travel. |
5. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt - Defies any genre
A story about Tova Sullivan who has lost her husband and, earlier in life, her son. Tova develops a remarkable friendship with a curmudgeonly octopus named Marcellus. Is it possible to write a soulful mystery like this that makes any sense? In Shelby Van Pelt’s hands, yes, yes, yes.
Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova’s son disappeared 30 years earlier. Now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it’s too late.
Unique, tender, uplifting.
6. Earth Abides by George R. Stewart - Science Fiction
First published in 1949, Earth Abides is one of the most influential science-fiction novels of the twentieth century. It’s still fresh and provocative; a story of an apocalyptic pandemic, societal collapse, and rebirth.
Ish is one of the few humans to escape the pandemic and soon begins a life-long journey that reveals the resilience of the planet and the humans who populate it.
This book is unlike any you’ve read in this genre. All of the story is told through Ish’s calm, insightful eyes and this is what makes the novel, along with its premise, absolutely impossible to put down.
7. Salt, a World History by Mark Kurlansky - History (Audio book by Scott Brick)
Mark Kurlansky has a knack for diving into one subject so deeply that he turns it into a riveting saga. In this case salt. The only rock we eat (and if we don’t, we die), salt has shaped civilization and the history of the human race. It is so valuable that it has served as currency, influenced the establishment of trade routes, provoked and financed wars, secured empires, and inspired revolutions. Populated by colorful characters and filled with an unending series of fascinating details, Salt is riveting. The research that is the foundation of this book boggles the brain.
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Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived. An international bestseller translated into four languages. Get the paperback for $5.99 during the holidays. Why did the line of ancient humans who eventually evolved into us survive when the others were shown the evolutionary door? |
8. Around the World in 80 Days by Michael Palin (not Jules Verne though we recommend that one too) - Travel
Michael Palin has done some traveling in his lifetime, and written about it with insight and wit while he was at it. In this book he follows in the footsteps of the fictional Phileas Fogg (Verne’s hero), and takes the same route. From the opulence of the "Orient Express" to the lurching progress of an Egyptian camel, from the hot and lively streets of Madras to the lofty heights of a hot-air balloon over Colorado, there is never a dull moment in his hilarious account of the journey. You may recall that Palin is one of the members of Monty Python, the hysterical British comedy troop. That humor reveals itself throughout Palin's travel writing and is one of the reasons the book is such a joy.
9. Eye of the Needle by Ken Follet - Thriller/Mystery
1944. In the weeks leading up to D-Day, the Allies are disguising their invasion plans with elaborate decoys of ships and planes in the hopes of gaining the upper hand in World War II. But a Nazi spy working in England learns of the plans. “The “Needle” is Hitler’s prize undercover agent – a ruthless, assassin. After leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, he races to a U-boat waiting to convey his critical message, but he hasn’t planned for a storm-battered island and the remarkable young woman who lives there . . . Just a brilliant story and a unique kind of thriller with real heart and emotion. Follett even manages to somehow make the Needle human and vulnerable, and therefore much more interesting than your average villain.
10. The Enormous Room by E.E. cummings - Memoir
The Enormous Room is a 1922 autobiographical novel by the poet and novelist E. E. Cummings about his temporary imprisonment in France during World War I. Cummings served as an ambulance driver during the war. In late August 1917 his friend and colleague, William Slater Brown, was arrested by French authorities as a result of antiwar sentiments. When questioned, Cummings stood by Brown and was also arrested. This book changed my life when I read it at 19. Cummings reveals the soaring optimism that makes his poetry great and his description of the people he meets makes you happy to be a member of the human race. It will move and change you, a Cummings specialty
11. The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein - Non-Fiction/Commentary
The defining term Klein uses in her book is “disaster capitalism.” At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years. You may or may not agree with Klein’s premise, but reading the book will shake you up and cause you to rethink capitalism. That’s a good thing because every premise should be questioned.
12. The Long Goodbye - by Raymond Chandler (Mystery)
Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett invented the noir, hard-boiled detective. But Chandler, as one reviewer once noted, “writes like a slumming angel,” and that gives his writing a touch of Shakespeare. In The Long Goodbye, detective Philip Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Soon Marlowe finds himself in the kind of trouble only Chandler can create - smoky, complex, brilliantly written with the kind of wit that makes you laugh out loud sometimes. “My mouth felt like the inside of a chauffeur’s glove.” The mystery is compelling, but it’s Chander’s writing that keeps you turning the page. He’s often been imitated, but rarely improved upon. I’ve re-read the book more times than I can count, just for the mastery of the language.
Looking for More Great Reads?
The 10 Greatest Travel-Adventure Books Ever (At Vagabond Adventure)
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What are your favorite books, eclectic or not? Please share yours in the comments…