Two Predictions

It’s time I put some thoughts together and made some predictions. Despite all the hype angle of AI, the conversations have brought to light some interesting questions. First, how soon will real artificial intelligence come to be? Will it be a slow growth or a rapid rise? And how will our societies adapt?

My first prediction is that the kind of generalised aritficial intelligence we think about when we consider self-awareness and rapid growth will take a while. It’s far more likely we’ll initially have a large number of specialised systems which spread across domains slowly.

My second prediction is that as a society we will tend to resist and restrain these developments to the extent that a new form of sovreignity will emerge from it. I don’t have a strong grasp yet of what shape it would take. Perhaps regulators will attempt to lock down what Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, et al. can do. In return these companies establish a new nation(??) and award digital residence to people across the world. A possible first corporate state. Hypothetical.

A new war between technology and politics is inevitable. Allow me to to backtrack a bit. Humans have been held together by the bonds of three forces. Money, Religion & the State. Money is a miracle, creating value seemingly out of nothing. Religion answers the call of mystery. Finally, the state fills our need for authority. This trifecta allows us to continue leading peaceful lives all knowing that life itself has no ultimate purpose except self-preservation.

Science came to dominate commerce quickly. Technology became the comepetitive advantage of businesses since the first wheels and levers. Science became the miracle worker, business the money earner. In the middle-part of the last millennium, Science fought a brutal, pitched battle against religion for the throne of mystery. Bloody, bruised and battered they shared the spoils with religion getting to provide miracles for the world’s poorest who couldn’t afford the magic of science.

Technology now has but one foe left to defeat to complete the trifecta and become a supreme god. Perhpas then we may reach unity. The unifying principle. There is a generation of technologists and entreprenurs at work on this. Building replacements for authority. Building alternative systems. It may appear hard to find them, but they’re there. Hiding in plain sight. Building their new ecosystem, their digitopia. With solar powered batteries sending rockets into space. With digital currency protected by unbreakable encryption. With decentralised distributed architecttures for tracking everything, shared ledgers to note and track every movement and every interaction with no one point of failure.

These petabytes of logs, proprietary to the companies providing the future digital infrastructure, will cover the minutiae of billions of peoples lives. It’ll be essential data needed to unlock more generalised intelligence.

With sovreignity, national identity and money taken from its purview, the power of the state over their populations will weaken. Technology will continue to offer alternatives short of direct confrontation. Till the technologists don’t have a general intelligence the balance of power lies with the state preventing war.

Once that line is breached…? Why don’t you tell me what you think.