Commentary

AI And Our Current Rugged Landscape

In evolution, there’s something called the adaptive landscape. It’s a complex concept, but in the smallest nutshell possible, it refers to how fit species are for a particular environment. In a relatively static landscape, status quos tend to be maintained. It’s business as usual. 

But a rugged adaptive landscape —-one beset by disruption and adversity — drives evolutionary change through speciation, the introduction of new and distinct species. 

The concept is not unique to evolution. Adapting to adversity is a feature in all complex, dynamic systems. Our economy has its own version. Economist Joseph Schumpeter called them Gales of Creative Destruction.

The same is true for cultural evolution. When shit gets real, the status quo crumbles like a sandcastle at high tide. When it comes to life today and everything we know about it, we are definitely in a rugged landscape. COVID-19 might be driving us to our new future faster than we ever suspected. The question is, what does that future look like?

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Homo Deus

In his follow up to his best-seller “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” author Yuval Noah Harari takes a shot at predicting just that. "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow" looks at what our future might be. Written well before the pandemic (in 2015) the book deals frankly with the impending irrelevance of humanity. 

The issue, according to Harari, is the decoupling of intelligence and consciousness. Once we break the link between the two, the human vessels that have traditionally carried intelligence become superfluous. 

In his book, Harari foresees two possible paths: techno-humanism and Dataism. 

Techno-humanism

In this version of our future, we humans remain essential, but not in our current form. Thanks to technology, we get an upgrade and become “super-human.”

Dataism

Alternatively, why do we need humans at all? Once intelligence becomes decoupled from human consciousness, will it simply decide that our corporeal forms are a charming but antiquated oddity and just start with a clean slate?

Our Current Landscape

Speaking of clean slates, many have been talking about the opportunity COVID-19 has presented to us to start anew. As I was writing this column, I received a press release from MIT promoting a new book "Building the New Economy," edited by Alex Pentland. I haven’t read it yet, but based on the first two lines in the release, it certainly seems to be following this type of thinking:“With each major crisis, be it war, pandemic, or major new technology, there has been a need to reinvent the relationships between individuals, businesses, and governments. Today's pandemic, joined with the tsunami of data, crypto and AI technologies, is such a crisis.”

We are intrigued by the idea of using the technologies we have available to us to build a societal framework less susceptible to inevitable Black Swans. But is this just an invitation to pry open Pandora’s Box and allow the future Yuval Noah Harari is warning us about?

The Debate 

Harari isn’t the only one seeing the impending doom of the human race. Elon Musk has been warning us about it for years. As we race to embrace artificial intelligence, Musk sees the biggest threat to human existence we have ever faced. 

“I am really quite close, I am very close, to the cutting edge in AI and it scares the hell out of me,” warns Musk. “It’s capable of vastly more than almost anyone knows and the rate of improvement is exponential.”

There are those that pooh-pooh Musk’s alarmism, calling it much ado about nothing. Noted Harvard cognitive psychologist and author Steven Pinker, whose rose-colored vision of humanity’s future reliably trends up and to the right, dismissed Musk’s warnings with this: “If Elon Musk was really serious about the AI threat, he’d stop building those self-driving cars, which are the first kind of advanced AI that we’re going to see.”

In turn, Musk puts Pinker’s Pollyanna perspective down to human hubris: “This tends to plague smart people. They define themselves by their intelligence and they don’t like the idea that a machine could be way smarter than them, so they discount the idea — which is fundamentally flawed.”

From Today Forward

This brings us back to our current adaptive landscape. It’s rugged. The peaks and valleys of our day-to-day reality are more rugged then they have ever been — at least in our lifetimes. 

We need help. And when you’re dealing with a massive threat that involves probability modeling and statistical inference, more advanced artificial intelligence is a natural place to look. 

Would we trade more invasive monitoring of our own bio-status and aggregation of that data to prevent more deaths? In a heartbeat.

Would we put our trust in algorithms that can instantly crunch vast amounts of data our own brains couldn’t possibly comprehend? We already have.

Will we even adopt connected devices constantly streaming the bits of data that define our existence to some corporate third party or government agency in return for a promise of better odds that we can extend that existence? Sign us up.

We are willingly tossing the keys to our future to the Googles, Apples, Amazons and Facebooks of the world. As much as the present may be frightening, we should consider the steps we’re taking carefully.

If we continue rushing down the path towards Yuval Noah Harari’s Dataism, we should be prepared for what we find there: “This cosmic data-processing system would be like God. It will be everywhere and will control everything, and humans are destined to merge into it."

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