Worlds in Flux

Flux equals Change

May you live in interesting times – an ancient Chinese curse, if rumor is believed. A quick check in Wikipedia reveals that, like much else attributed to the ancient Chinese, this one too is a hoax. Our times though – most interesting. Change is in the air. Stick your nose out and get a good deep sniff. Waves of national sentiment pour out across the globe. Harnessed by opportunists and megalomaniacs alike, they peel back the dark sky on the dawn of a new age. An age of glorious national productivity and happy faces singing wholesome songs amidst sun-kissed fields.

Me, I’m wondering what energy powers these waves. I’m struck that calls for greater communal identity are often most vocal at times when identity is most threatened. Stronger nationalism is perhaps a response to its visible erosion in the public square. Decades of global integration has produced a bastard culture belonging to no one and yet to everyone. Or perhaps there is a different existential threat. One made more visible by our Russian friend Mr. Putin who believes that limited nuclear war is winnable. Or perhaps it is a fight against our uneasy relationship with technology. A relationship sending us hurtling into wider arcs, further and further away from each other. In less than a decade, the illusion of togetherness from pseudo-communities has gripped human connection. Every day it forments more self-centred bubbles of promotion than ever before. Even its creators see the future only in their ability to spin the illusion ever-further.

Birth

In the midst of such angst, we birth a vision of truly intelligent machines. If the media hype cycle is to be believed – and I can be sure that, from news to editorial to film and television, we are truly in the midst of an epic hype cycle – humanity stands at the cusp of a breakthrough which reduces our inteligence, a bastion of our human-ness, to a mere commodity. Time to be very afraid indeed. Time indeed to re-affirm those very human identities I have.

Doubt

Me, I’m swaddled with questions. Are the rumors of AI’s rise greatly exaggerated? Forget modeling capacity, forget data sets, forget optimisation and increase in computing efficiency, do we have a basis to bootstrap intelligence? Are we any closer to having an understanding of how intelligence can be created? Human behaviour (and by proxy, intelligence) is governed by a vast network of interconnected reward mechanisms. Avoiding communal pain and suffering are fundamental to our process of learning and creation. Are there any conceptual analogues for such mechanisms in machines? Or can the mathematics of 1s and 0s play an effective substitute for emotional rollercoasters? Are we armed with more than a trusty toolbox of duplicate screwdrivers? And could we be bandying about an ancient Turing test whose essential premise (conversational ability as a proxy to intelligence) is myopic and childishly naive at best?

Prospects

It’s not to say that these developments in AI are to be ignored. Such is the volume of hype that while the marketing may prove to be overly optimisitc, its basis and impact may not be all empty sound bites. Already, the AI revolution has succeeded in making Data Science sexy in a manner that BigData never managed. Automation masquerading as intelligence can certainly tilt economic scales at a global level. Replacing ten working adults with one can become a nightmare for economies counting on demographic dividends of a large working age population. We already exist in a world where return on capital outstrips the return on labour. More automation can further weaken those for whom labour is the only economic good they have on offer. Is is possible for us to conceive of AI as an augmentation technology? One that brings more people within striking distance of a high bar. Can we shift glorified skills from the realm of art to mechanical technique? In the process we can create new possibilities of livelihood for those so far disenfranchised. That a vision of a more fulfilled populace can come to be.

Fin.