The age old advise of doing what you are passionate about is more relevant today than ever before in human history. To understand why it is more relevant today we need to look at a slight bit of human history.
- 2 million years ago humans evolved in Africa
- 300,000 years ago we started using fire
- 70,000 years ago we had the cognitive revolution and fictive languages emerged
- 12,000 years ago we had the agricultural revolution
- 200 years ago we had the industrial revolution
- Today we are in the midst of the AI revolution
Artificial Intelligence is actually a very broad topic and to understand what is in store for us we need to understand the different kinds of AI. AI can be broadly classified into 3 categories
- Artificial Narrow Intelligence - is AI that specializes in one area, AI that is designed for Chess can easily beat the shit out of our chess grand masters but can’t do anything other than that
- Artificial General Intelligence - refers to a computer that is smart across the board with the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, and learn from experience. Creating AGI is much harder than creating ANI and we are yet to create AGI.
- Artificial Super Intelligence - ASI will be way smarter than the best humans in practically every field
Our lives are already surrounded by AI. Your car is full of ANI, the ABS in your car is ANI the fuel Injection system in your car is ANI, almost everything in your phone is ANI. The AI revolution is the road from ANI to AGI because once we reach AGI, ASI is inevitable.
The road to AGI:
The cutting edge in AI is not super smart programmers writing algorithms for super smart AI but super smart programmers writing algorithms for AI whose two major skills will be to do research in AI and improve its own code. Once we have AGI we are not really sure how much time we will take to reach ASI. We might reach it in a matter of minutes or we might take years to get there.
When we are talking about a artificial self-improving system the most important concept that you need to understand is the concept of intelligence explosion.
Intelligence Explosion: A general purpose AI that can do only rudimentary tasks (which are not predefined) will at some point improve itself to the level where it can perform every task to a degree as good as a human. But the important thing to understand here is that the AI doesn’t need to stop at human level intelligence because human level intelligence in the intelligence spectrum is just an arbitrary point. The AI is bound to far exceed human intelligence. So what are the implications of having super intelligence on this planet. Before we fathom the implications we need to look at the difference between qualitative and quantitative intelligence.
Quantitative Intelligence: Is the ability to reach an answer really quickly. In a way computers are already better than us in this aspect. A computer will take a fraction of a second to tell you what is the answer for 1357.78 * 345.32.
Qualitative Intelligence: Is the ability to understand abstract concepts. If there is a question that takes you 5 minutes to solve it doesn’t imply that a chimpanzee will be able to solve that question in an hour or a month (even if you give that chimpanzee access to the best calculators). The chimpanzee will simply never be able to solve this problem. If you take a chimpanzee to a dam the chimpanzee can never comprehend that humans built the dam. From the chimpanzees point of view, the dam simply is another mountain. This huge gulf in our ability to think and comprehend arises from a very small increase in intelligence. So an AI that is only slightly better than humans can do things that we cannot imagine or comprehend. But the point is that AI doesn’t have to be slightly more intelligent than humans, it has the potential to exceed us by an insanely huge margin. Solving the biggest challenges that humanity faces today will be extremely simple for the ASI. But before we get all excited about the dawn of a new age we need to ask ourselves the most important question.
Will the AI be friendly or will it be the end of humanity? As of now we don’t know. Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are all very cautious about AI.
If the AI is friendly, it has the potential to create a world of abundance where the economics we use to run today's society would no longer be relevant. If the AI is bad, Humanity wouldn’t really stand a chance to protect itself against this super intelligence. So how far out into the future is all this stuff? According to some of the titans of this industry, we have a little over a decade to reach AGI. So either ways it makes sense to live fully today, doing stuff that you are passionate about because in a decade you would either be in a world that doesn’t have money and has an abundance of everything or……...