Of late I’ve been worrying – perhaps overmuch – about the likelihood we’re in the midst of a period of change which outstrips the ability of our institutions to adapt. As a putative writer and lifelong consumer of science fiction and fact, I recognize the notion that progress outstrips adaptation as being akin to what has been termed the Technological Singularity.
Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.
– Vernor Vinge, essay on the Singularity
And as a chronic meditator on politics and social matters, I have begun to think that there is a real sense in which we are, indeed, in the midst of a singularity of sorts. It may not be exactly what Vinge was thinking about, or indeed what Ray Kurzweil was talking about when he wrote:
What, then, is the Singularity? It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives…
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near
But if our institutions cannot keep up, there is an analogy to be made nonetheless
For me, the above can be distilled into a single question:
What career advice can you offer a child about choosing a career in the next 10 years that you think will likely offer them a long and fruitful working life?
A shocking (to me, at least) number of people respond with “plumber” or another skilled trade, which mystifies me. Plumbing is complex, no doubt, but it’s primarily about geometry, fluid dynamics, and encyclopedic knowledge of the tools and hardware involved. These are not difficult areas of expertise for a software-based intelligence to develop; indeed, such an intelligence would be vastly easier to replicate than the human equivalent.
I suspect that at some point someone will come up with a piece of hardware that you, as a homeowner, can buy for under a thousand dollars (and perhaps a modest subscription fee) that will be capable of performing the vast majority of home plumbing jobs. I can already point to examples from the likes of GE’s pipe unclogging robot and Wuhan Easy-Sight’s pipe inspection robot.
That’s not to say they’ll be legal, mind. Plumbing and electrical work are heavily regulated and tied into the insurance industry in ways that make them particularly resilient against change. But being legal to use and being legal to purchase are not the same thing.
Most homeowners have made changes to their homes that are not strictly legal in the sense we’re talking about. They didn’t pull permits or announce the work being done to their insurance company. They take the extremely small risks associated with doing these things outside “official” channels because they save a significant amount of money by doing so. Permitted, certified work is very often much more expensive than the alternatives.
It seems to me that there’s not much daylight between DIY home maintenance and AI home maintenance. And if you can breach that barrier a little, there’s a flood of demand for money-saving technologies like this. We’ve had the ability to do skilled trades by zoom for decades now, and the last few years have shown us just how valuable such things can be.
Is There Any Hope For Our Future (Incomes)?
Two things I should mention at this point:
- Social institutions are by their nature reactive. If there are examples where they got ahead of the curve, those are rare exceptions. They react, and they try to anticipate obvious permutations, but big changes require “Progress funeral-by-funeral“. This is not what I’m talking about here.
- Universal Basic Income and other such programmes offer a systemic off-ramp that obviates the concern to a large extent. There are a LOT of things that need to change beyond the basic assumptions behind the modern “working life” – not least that we cannot tolerate the extraordinary waste associated with the existence of inequality and the super-rich in a post-singularity society – but nonetheless, these ideas will be important in the years and decades to come. How we interact with them will, to a large extent, determine whether we fumble towards disaster or utopia.
These are important points, but they don’t fix the issue of runaway progress. At a certain point, we either have to slow down or we have to make fundamental changes to how our societies operate.
I’ll also admit that I don’t have any particular confidence in my projections here. For all that Kurzweil has been predicting a “strong” Singularity in the first half of this century, I have been dubious most of my life that we will ever really see that curve go vertical. I expected the slow faltering of Moore’s Law would bend the really steep slope down to a gentle plateau.
But 2022 showed me something. I don’t know enough to say for sure whether it’s “AI is progressing faster than I ever imagined” or “Human intelligence is dumber than I could have imagined”, but either way it amounts to the same thing – our capacity to keep pace is falling to zero, and only massive social upheaval will be enough to curtail it.
So What (Job) Do I Do?
Annoyingly, I don’t have any answers for this. Fundamentally, we’re already at the point where anyone who’s interested can get a subscription to an infinite number of books (or graphic novels, or art pieces, or musical compositions, or…) that they can tailor to their precise interests. Whether that is socially just or not, it’s the reality with which we must now reckon. It has been hard to justify working in the creative arts for a long time now, given the thousands of books and dozens of games and so on that are published each day, but this is still a new thing – we are witnessing the automation of creativity, and it is truly a Pandora’s box.
And not for nothing, but like the hypothetical plumbing robot, these are tools that can be widely duplicated and utilized for cheap or free. And they can only really get better. Artists are already realizing that every door into the career they’ve enjoyed just slammed shut, and the ladder is rapidly being pulled up behind them.
They’re fighting it, to be sure. And we will see how that fight goes in the next few years. But.
In 5 years, it’s likely that there will be well-known AI art pieces that do not rely on prompts to ape a human’s style. The ability to generate and iterate on themes, to understand form and composition – these are not the rarefied abilities we dreamed of. They’re mostly signal cascades in a mechanistic – though unimaginably complex – Rube Goldberg machine.
We’ll argue for decades about whether any AI work is truly “inspired”. Some artists are currently busy telling folks they can tell AI art from human art. And no doubt they can, for now.
But that horizon gets shorter every year. We’ve seen the Turing Test fall by the wayside, and the remainder of the discussion is in the rapidly narrowing margins of what it means that a particular AI passes the test in particular situations.
My personal initiative to try to ameliorate these concerns has been focused on cognitive neuroprosthetics, and in particular cognitive augmentation. We’re already seeing therapeutic use of neurotechnology, from Deep Brain Stimulation for a broad swathe of conditions to work on moving from motor control to cognitive therapy. There’s a possible future in which these tools allow us to join the superintelligence. It’s a hope that echoes back through the history of science fiction and futurism. We’re seeing signs that it could be a reality.
But there are dangers in that hope, too. Wishing for a thing can push us to make bad choices, and in this case we could push BCI technology too far too fast, or we could let runaway AI outstrip us entirely on the assumption that we’ll catch up someday.
I don’t know how to wrangle all of this into a neat conclusion – sorry about that. I encourage anyone who finds this a useful examination to dig deeper, and to take whatever action feels appropriate. I think we at least need to get past our current systems and focus on making a world where lives can be sustained independent of “free markets”. The baseline for human existence should be that we are fed, housed, and offered opportunities to do useful and productive activities without needing to constantly feed an engine of debt and commercial interests. In my unburdened moments I’ve thought that perhaps I could engage in politics to try to enact such changes directly. But I suspect that I could never manage that life long-term. The demands and the influences would crack my fragile health at the first gate.
But maybe you, gentle reader, could do better. Hope yer well.
“See Spot Run — Dog vs. Robot” by jurvetson is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
