Our Conviction of Our Own Brilliance is The Biggest Threat in the AI Context
I am always amused by the observation that as I go to buy my lottery ticket Im more likely to be struck by lightning than to win the top prize. Just like all the others the belief that maybe, just maybe ..... trumps the reality which is that repeated purchases of tickets is making me poorer., not richer.
The limitation of human reasoning and perception are many, but the fact remains that for millenia, we have been the cleverest act around. Our social nature combined with our reasoning has taken us from a few thousand primates scared that pretty much everything on the savanah was dangerous, to 7 billion people, living in cities, inventors and masters of technologies that just keep making life better and better. Along the way we got religion, and if not religion a pretty strong conviction that the universe had never and would never see anything better than us, and our way of doing things.
And now we are entering the new world of Artiffical Intelligence (AI). Another breakthrough. The optimistic view, which I share, is that society will benefit and adapt as we have done before. Where I think there is a potential lack of understanding is that this time its not our phsycial processes and speed of computation that are being changed under our direction. This time we have made something that does everything we do that we thought set us above and apart - the reasoning, the creativity. We have made something that can learn, and has more capacity than us to access information.
Memories do not match the whole internet. It is not useful to say we are better at reasoning, creativity etc,. because the machine just uses logic and lots of calculations, while our brains do it better. Be careful when you say the human brain is better, becasue we don't actually yet know what the human brain is doing. Maybe at a sub cellular level, or at a neural network level it is actually also doing lots of calculations, and we just haven't seen that yet. And if this is the case - if we are just a biological computer, then it is quite possible to build a phsical copmputer that has more capacity, and is actually "better". Worst of all, if the output is better, and it looks and feels like something a human has done, then what point are we making other than "its different".
The point is that the output of AI is already surpassing anything a human brain can do in some areas, it is starting to show that creativity. Working from a database of faces to identify a single face is useful. Allowing the algorithms to work " in reverse ", is intriguing. "See this, suggest that" becomes "Suggest that, see this". Starting with the idea of a face and asking AI to make one is creative. So creativity is no longer just for us. AI is delivering something new, not just more or faster.
It seems that this new technology will not be a servant. That would seem to position it as "other" which is scary, or as a partner which seems less so. Somehow we have to adapt to not being the best, and to find a way to adapt our society and all our activities accordingly. Mankind (vs. humanity) has never been very good at that. The experieince of women, races, marginal communities shows the challenge of men sharng power when things change.
If we take this conservative approach (small "c") it will be a case of here we go again ..... However, if we want a more positive outcome for all the observation is that more equal societies in terms of opportunity seem to prosper more than those that hold to ideas of superiority.
