Humans and AI: A Symbiotic Relationship?

The idea that artificial intelligence will soon become super-intelligent and discover that humans are a nuisance to be exterminated forthwith is certainly a frightening vision of the near-term future. Some of the people who are actually engaged in what is transpiring take the position that the merest chance that this may actually happen should persuade us to cease and desist from all work on AI. Others, myself included, see the “us-them” separation between human and artificial minds as a disappearing distinction, and therefore beneath our concern. This, more optimistic, group envisions a symbiotic relationship that transforms into a complete melding of human with machine, until there are just minds, comprised of various amalgams of both.

In fact, symbiosis already exists between organic and non-organic intelligence. In my real-world occupation I am a financial aid adviser. At my finger tips are networks of schools, lenders, government agencies, and the machines and software applications that make the whole thing work. In a few minutes I can put together a financial aid package for a student so that their entire education at my school will be paid for. The machines could not do it without my mind’s assistance. I certainly could not do it without the technology, certainly not with the efficiency and productivity that is possible now. This symbiosis reminds me of Vernor Vinge’s excellent novel, A Deepness in the Sky.

In the novel, a race of humans called the Emergence develops a unique method of focusing the minds of humans to such an extent that, together with computers, they can transcend the power of either in previously unimaginable ways. This human-machine collaboration is not merely science-fiction, however. Some of the most effective search engines in existence today have humans in the loop. My prediction is that this symbiosis will continue, until technology arrives at literal physical blending, either by the instantiation of human minds into machines, or machine parts being connected directly with human neurons. Or both.

The result of this symbiosis/blending will be that there will exist no substantial distinction between humans and machines once AGI comes into being. I sure hope it turns out this way.

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Where Have All the Workers Gone? Enter AGI

It won’t be long before employers are singing this song, if demographers are correct in their predictions. Researchers tell us that the Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964 and numbering some 79.9 million souls (Mature Market Institute, 2000), will soon begin retiring. So what’s the problem with that? The problem is, there aren’t enough people in the generation called Gen-X to fill those newly open positions. In fact, according to Law Practice Today, there are only 51 million people around who were born between 1965 and 1976. What does this mean? Very simply, we can expect a serious labor shortage to settle over the land soon, and last 10 to 15 years.

While managers alternate between hoping the doomsayers are wrong and doing everything they can to attract and keep talented workers, they will find that there are not enough warm bodies to go around. Some firms will probably thrive in this worker-poor market, but many will feel the pinch. There are two possible circumstances that this scenario might bring about that I will posit here.

First, the law of supply and demand may cause firms to pay a significant premium in salaries, which may bring about inflation. Second, firms may begin to push hard for the development of some very serious automation. Serious as in general artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence today is comprised of applications that can perform a narrow range of tasks very well; far better than humans, in fact. But that narrowness places some significant boundaries in the way of solving the labor shortage problem. General artificial intelligence would solve it in two ways: Such intelligences could be deployed and trained to perform any task a human could perform, only a lot better. Second, they would quickly improve themselves to the extent that they would be smart enough to find other solutions to the problem.

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Predicting the Path to AI

As they say, hindsight has perfect vision. It is a simple matter to look back after an event takes place and recreate the path of steps that led up to that event. It is much more difficult to see that path in advance. When AI is born, assuming that such an event would be immediately apparent, and assuming that it has not yet occurred, what path will it have taken? Will cloud computing and data centers turn out to have been a crucial fork in the road?

IBM and Google have announced a joint initiative to build large data centers that will allow students and researchers to participate in remote "cloud computing," at term that refers to the combined use of thousands of processors, vast libraries of data, and specialized software that "scour the Web and other data sources in seconds or minutes for patterns and insights."

As these cloud computing centers are created and more and more resources are injected into their ever-increasing capacities, will a crucial threshold be attained? It has been theorized that consciousness is an inevitable outcome when a sufficient degree of processing complexity is reached. Are we on a path to the inevitable emergence of a conscious Internet? If this is indeed what happens, remember where you heard it first. Stay tuned.

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Creation of Artificial Life to be Announced

We knew it was coming, but perhaps not this soon. Guardian Unlimited is reporting the imminent announcement of the creation of a completely man-made lifeform.

Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

Will this be the development that finally captures the attention of the public? Will people begin to pay attention to the accelerating pace of technological progress? Will the idea of the singularity become firmly planted in the popular imagination? We will know soon enough.

The announcement, which is expected within weeks and could come as early as Monday at the annual meeting of his scientific institute in San Diego, California, will herald a giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes. It is certain to provoke heated debate about the ethics of creating new species and could unlock the door to new energy sources and techniques to combat global warming.

I can already hear the obtuse accusations that will be launched by the religious, and the ways that politicians will attempt to co-opt developments to the benefit of their own agendas. More's the pity. But no matter, the singularity will happen anyway. Stay tuned.

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