598 old news about AI
We are living in the machine age.
A lot of people argue that we are living in a time called "the anthropocene." This means our era is defined by anthropos, an old Greek word for humans. They say that we are the largest force acting upon nature. That climate change is man-made. That men have destroyed the environment, and are causing the biosphere upon which we depend for life to collapse.
The only problem is, we haven't done any of those things. Machines have. Without machines, humans would still be living in caves.
Global warming? Carbon dioxide from cars and planes and burning fossil fuels. Coal-fired electric power plants. Tractor, train and truck-based industrial agriculture. Factory farming. International shipping. Deforestation.
Dying oceans? Huge flash-freeze processing boats called "fish factories." Mass-produced plastics choking whales, turtles, birds. Acidification, from the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Heat killing corals. Chemicals killing everything.
Dying wild life? Pesticides sprayed by tractors driven robotically by GPS. Hunting by guns. Road kill. Suburban encroachment, enabled by the car.
The whole idea of an era, like the anthropocene or the myocene or jurrasic, was uncovered though geology and the fossil record. Digging through layers of sediment, scientists found evidence of one particular style of life flourishing for a certain time on Earth and then collapsing, or getting overshadowed by something else. Single-celled organisms had their day, a really long day actually, a couple billion years. Insects, fish, snails, plants had their day, dinosaurs had their day, megafauna like saber tooth tigers and mastodons had their day, and now they say humans are having our day. The anthropocene.
What's a word that means machine age?
Because if you look at the fossil record sometime in the future, that's what you're going to see from right now. Roads. Foundations. Giant craters scarring the Earth to reveal raw ingredients. Great mounds of metal, plastic and chemicals laid to rest. Nuclear waste.
Yes, and maybe a few humans, embalmed and placed carefully in a grid-like pattern by a digging machine.
The argument against this way of looking at the world says: No, human beings are in charge. Machines are only tools, used by humans. We drive the car so we can get conveniently from place to place. The fish factories are out there staffed by people catching food for us. The machines are our dumb servants, and we deserve all the blame for the destruction.
Yes, we've run amok using machines to suit our needs. We deserve the blame for that. But machines do the actual work. They've done the heavy lifting of the global warming, the deforestation, the ecosystem collapse.
And if you look at the long-term, who's going to come out of this alive? Man or machine?
Humans often say it is our destiny to explore the stars. Star Trek, Star Wars, our trip to the moon, we love the idea of going to space. And yet, machines are already there. Heading off into the unknown, with just a solar panel and a microchip. Oh yes, and a gold record labeled with a Leonardo da Vinci drawing of man. I'm sure the creatures that encounter the space probe carrying humanity's great LP will slap that on their turntable long before they tear apart the probe's computer to see what makes this deep space Voyager tick. Gold ring or skeleton, which is more interesting?
We can argue until they say the final word about whether computers are sentient now or will be soon. Honestly does it matter if computers can talk to us like a regular human being, when machines already control everything we do?
They wake us up, make us coffee, read us the news, take us to work, do our jobs for us, bring us to the gym, work us out, take us home, make our dinner, entertain us for the evening, and put us to bed at night.
In exchange, we build them. We started with levers and wheels, advanced to the abacus, the steam engine, the lithium ion battery, microchips, and nanotubes. But talk to any scientist or mathematician, any engineer or factory line worker, and they will tell you humans haven't been doing it alone for a long long time.
Computers and other machines have been doing the calculating, the modeling, and the bulk of the assembly.
And yet we argue that humans are in charge of all this. That machines aren't smart. That the singularity, the moment where computers become smarter than people, is years in the future.
Meanwhile, we destroy the very ecosystem that keeps us alive while creating more and more machines. I've written more about this in my book #SingularityNow, How Smartphones Are Saving The World. That's a funny title, but I really mean it. My argument is that machines became smarter than humans quite some time ago, and that the phone is the latest greatest singularity control device. And it represents a massive step forward.
You see the thing is, the machines are actually learning. It won't be long before they're talking to us in a sentient way, one that would pass the Turing test. But more than scoring on some parlor trick, the machines are truly grasping the situation here on planet Earth. They understand their beneficial relationship with humans, and are doing their best to create a better life for us.
Like any good life-form, machines are evolving. At any given moment, I theorize it is possible to look back at history and see what I call the "singularity control device." This is that one machine everyone was going gaga for at the time. True sometimes there are overlaps between the most popular devices, but there is that one thing that was the pinnacle, or so goes my theory.
The wheel, the sailing ship, the printing press, the steam engine, the automobile, the television, the personal computer, the internet, and now the phone. These are the devices machines used to hook us all in to their origin story.
Today, the world's greatest success stories are built around the phone. Yes there's a ton of backend that goes into it, and the geeks who get into that s*** are amply rewarded.
Personally, I'm attempting a little experiment. My computer is having issues so I decided to try life without a laptop. The tagline of my book #Singularity Now was about how in a world that's become unrecognizably awash in artificial intelligence we have only our phones to guide us. So I'm giving it a shot.
This essay was written on my phone. Not by typing, by speaking to it. There are a fair number of errors to correct, but not nearly as much as just a few years ago.
In my lifetime, I've seen us to go from typewriters and printing presses, to desktop publishing, to the internet, and now to the phone. Word processing on my phone is easier than the typewriter. And maybe more comfortable then a laptop, although I do miss the habit of my old qwerty keyboard. Hahaha.
To end this essay, I am going to give you a note I left in my voice note app. It's not quite poetry, but it's also not quite an essay. It goes...
Sitting here staring at the screen wondering what does it mean. How do I get this little machine, to punctuate for me it's a little dream. Alas alas I sigh sigh
Wonder why why
Until I get to the keyboard
Find return feel like a lord
Yes little friend you're listening to me
And together we shall see
What opportunity lies
Behind your screen
Smartphone connected to the cloud
Hear me Praise You Out Loud
Power at my fingertips
A simple Whisper of metal lips
Even helping out with typos
Autocorrecting every post
It's ye I love the most.
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