HAL 9000, here we come

How many more years do you think you will live? I’ll turn 50 this December and, with good health and good luck, can expect to be around for another quarter century or so. Meaning, I will check out around 2044. If you can hold out for another 10 years beyond that, meaning to the year 2055, there’s a pretty good chance that you could live forever. (Bear with me.)

I’ve been reading up on Technological Singularity and have written about it here before. This week brought news that something is stirring in that field. I’ll get to that in a minute, but first allow me to recapitulate for those who may not have heard of what is happening in the field of artificial intelligence. Readers will know of Moore’s Law, which says the computing power doubles every 18 months or so. This has been true for the last several decades and it’s a pretty reliable indicator of where technology will be in the future. Now, the human brain operates as a sort of computer, operating on around 20 watts of power with around 90 billion neurons, a cell that transmits impulses leading to the process we call thought. Having reduced this to numbers and processes we can demystify intelligence. If we can replicate that in a computer then we can create a machine that thinks.

The prediction from those who work on this is that this should happen around 2045 or so. They are quite convinced that it will happen by 2055. Once human-like general intelligence or something close to it is developed, the machine can improve itself at a pace that we cannot comprehend. The prediction is that once we achieve human standards, that machine will become as close to a god as we can imagine in a matter of hours or less.

It can figure out how to become better and be able to create devices and machines that will make it capable of anything. And, of course, it can instantly cure any problems of medicine, war, hunger, literacy and any of the other things that we have been struggling with. This is what is called the Technological Singularity and while we can try and imagine what it will look like, nobody really knows, except for the fact that it will happen. Moore’s Law makes it inevitable that we will create human-quality intelligence.

There is fear of this new thing that we are creating, which will be much, much smarter than all of us and much more powerful and much more capable. One of the things that is being proposed is that we fuse ourselves with this intelligence in some way so that we are not reduced to being its pets or becoming irrelevant.

This brings me to the development that I referred to above. One of the foremost thinkers in this field, Elon Musk of Tesla, runs a company called Neuralink. The firm tweeted this on July 11: “We’re having an event next Tuesday in San Francisco to share a bit about what we’ve been working on the last two years, and we’ve reserved a few seats for the internet.” Why is that important? Well, Musk had said last year that“Neuralink will have something interesting to announce in a few months that’s at least an order of magnitude better than anything else, probably better than anyone thinks is possible”.

File photo of Tesla Motors Inc Chief Executive Elon Musk

So what is the announcement about? We will know on Tuesday night, but it is highly likely that the company will show some progress in its path to fusing mind and machine. If this sounds weird, consider what Musk said about this some time ago: “The thing that people, I think, don’t appreciate right now is that they are already a cyborg. You’re already a different creature than you would have been twenty years ago or even ten years ago. 

You’re already a different creature. You can see this when they do surveys of like, ‘how long do you want to be away from your phone?’ and—particularly if you’re a teenager or in your 20s — even a day hurts. If you leave your phone behind, it’s like missing limb syndrome. I think people — they’re already kind of merged with their phone and their laptop and their applications and everything.”

What Neuralink is doing is to make us more cyborg-like and trying to integrate the woman and the machine. Can we communicate with each other through thought? It is such things that they are working on. It may seem astonishing but so would an iPhone be if handed to someone in 1985. We are much, much closer to the future than we think. Moore’s Law and other scientific progress that is happening all the time have already made things possible that we wouldn’t believe or think of as being magic.

Just reading about all this and trying to keep up with what is happening and what will happen is exciting to me and I will be keenly awaiting what Neuralink will announce and what its implications are for humanity. Even if the progress announced seems minor, remember that technological growth is exponential. Compare the first iPhone to the ones we have today, only 10 years on, and you will see what I mean.

In my five decades, this is the most exciting time I can remember when great and enormous change is just around the corner. I hope I am around to see it unfold in full and witness the Singularity, though I am personally not attracted to the idea of eternal life.