George Rebane

Have you noticed over the years when we have met in these pages to talk about the Singularity, that today finally everyone is talking about it in one fashion or another.  It’s as if suddenly everyone who reads is being introduced to the newest developments in AI and the possible futures it portends for humanity.  To be sure, not everyone in this conversation is still aboard with the inevitable advent of AGI (artificial general intelligence), the level of machine cognition that has become the specific definition of the Singularity.  (see more in Singularity Signposts)

Let’s first dispense with troglodytes like the Dr Miguel Nicolelis, Distinguished Professor in the Duke School of Medicine, Professor of Neuro-science and Co-Director of Duke’s Center for Neuroengineering.  He writes about ‘The Perils of Putting a Chip In Your Brain’ and tries to make the case that striving for transhumanism is fraught with unacceptable risks which in the end will still be futile in humanity’s competition with the machine, which he believes will never even equal us where it counts – creativity.  He concludes the display of his ignorance of what already has transpired with –

The human brain should be revered as something exquisite and unique. We need to rethink the role of digital systems in education and ensure that humans—not machines, or humans joined to them— control the creation and decision-making process for art, science, politics and all the things that define us. Digital technology will never surpass what our brains can do—but it can shape them, and that is the biggest danger.

Duke should be looking for a new a new co-director.

Nicolelis is not alone in his dim and uninformed view of machine intelligence evolution.  There are also international notables like Nick Bostrom and Stephen Hawking (whom we have reviewed), who still believe that humans will write the code for the first AGI, when even now such efforts have pretty much been abandoned by that dwindling rear guard of ‘programming AI’.  As argued in these pages for years, AGI will be achieved ONLY through machines that develop their smarts through learning.  The most that humans can do and are doing today is developing algorithms and paradigms that make such learning machines more facile.  None of these bleeding-edge workers know exactly what these machines will wind up learning and what they will be able to do after they have been allowed to chomp through vast amounts of realworld data, measurements, and/or observations.  Trained neural nets don’t yet fully reveal their inner workings as they fashion the immensely complex discriminants that allow the amazing feats they today demonstrate in game playing, medical diagnoses, financial decisions, speech understanding, facial recognition, and the dynamic control of some very complex systems.

In tune with what’s really happening and what will be required in the very near future are people like Dr Christof Koch, chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute of Brain Science, who understands and promotes transhumanism.  He argues that ‘We’ll Need Bigger Brains’ in order “to avoid a dystopian future fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence, (and) we must move quickly to create technologies that enhance the human brain.”  The whole goal is to “keep up with machines” and become a thriving part of the post-Singularity future.  The alternative is to become a kept species that will ultimately die out or just be disposed of by the then dominant intelligence as described by several authors, most recently by Max Tegmark in his Life 3.0 (2017).  Koch and other transhumanists point to computationally augmented humans with microchips in their bodies that can compute, communicate, and store data that is all accessible and controllable through new brain-machine interfaces being now developed by a “burgeoning neuro-tech industry”.  And ominously, Dr Koch makes it clear that it is the heavy hand of government that can act as the anchor to these critically needed advances.

The most significant ‘hardware’ developments to support all areas of modern societies are in quantum computing.  All nations have major programs akin to our fabled WW2 Manhattan Project to develop the first practical (i.e. 50 qubit) quantum computer.  And the big fear is that them that gets there firstest with the mostest will wind up ruling the roost on this planet.  A good tutorial on quantum computers, ‘Welcome to the Quantum Age’ by Jack Nicas, appeared this weekend in the Nov/Dec issue of WSJ’s magazine The Future of Everything.  Globally, China has placed the largest bets on getting there first with new quantum computing institute under construction.  In America the leading contender in the race is Google.  Our federal government, as usual, is a day late and more than a buck short.  It’s hard to tell how many times we can pull a hat trick by coming up with some critical needed technology in the nick of time.  We’ve done it in the past, but the lead times to do it again are getting exponentially shorter.  As usual, it appears that the only hope for salvation here is from a minimally fettered private sector.  (more here)