As a writer, my job is to recognize the relationship between things that may otherwise go undetected, and when it comes to the future of AI, I can’t help but notice several similarities.
One of my favorite explanations of Artificial Intelligence comes from the work of Tim Urban over at Wait But Why. He has a special knack for simplifying the complex.
The danger, he says, of AI is that it is going to be so overwhelmingly smart that it’s not just capable of doing things better than we can. It will actually be able to do things without us ever understanding how it does them.
He likens it to the difference between us and chimps.
“If you take a chimp outside on a starry night,” he once said during an interview with Tim Ferriss, “and have him look up, he may notice the lights of the planes and satellites up in the sky, but he doesn’t know what they are, and he can’t possibly conceive that we put them there.”
That is what AI is going to be like.
A lot of the experts seem to be in agreement. For a long time, the human mind represented the most formidable problem-solving (or problem-creating) machine on Earth. A group of people focused on the same thing represented quite a formidable force.
The great risk of AI is that it will not just be a little smarter, but vastly, vastly more capable than even all the humans on Earth put together.
I’m not disputing that.
It’s just that to my humble writer brain, the threat of a vast omnipotent force, a super-intelligence that is orders of magnitude more capable than all of mankind, capable of doing things we can’t even begin to understand, and imbued with the power to either sustain life, or destroy it en-masse… well, it just sounds kind of familiar.
It sounds like nature.
Nature is the only real intelligence. We don’t usually like to think so. Just look at the impressive cities we’ve built. But get just a little bit more rain than normal, or a little bit less, and watch how human superiority is called into question.
As I write these words, the city of Austin has been under a boil-water notice for a week after rain washed silt into the Colorado River, mucking up our water treatment plants. Restaurants were closed down, hospitals were impacted. The supermarkets ran out of water the first day, and parks were shut down and turned into emergency water dispensaries.
Civilization is balanced on a thread.
It was a quick and powerful reminder that nature ultimately has the last say, and has since the beginning of time.
I remember the first time I ever truly realized the overwhelming, indeed uncaring, power of nature.
To me, that is what AI will probably be like.
Note here that I’m not disagreeing or trying to downplay the threat that AI represents. I think the threat is quite real, capable of the destruction of cities and the deaths of untold thousands of people.
But I would stop short of saying it’s a species-level threat.
Civilization-ending? Perhaps. At least in isolated cases, it’s likely that AI will lead to some cataclysmic event that makes certain cities uninhabitable, the same way a hurricane or drought does. Similarly, it will allow people to thrive in other areas, perhaps bringing stability that has thusfar been absent.
Through it all, I don’t think any of it will be personal. Like nature, my suspicion is that we will hardly matter at all to AI. Not a species to be crushed out of existence, but not a species to be favored either. Just another thing floating down the river of life.