Here Come The Machines!

Suppose you are a human chef "cooking up" the future. As such, you have a limited number of recipes to choose from. But what astonishing recipes they are! Consider this one, which we see all the time.

1. Take one quart of Pure Fantasy
2. Mix that with one quart of Technology Über Alles
3. For consistency and flavor, add a few ounces of Optimism and Obligatory Hope
   
4. For savor and color, add several heaping tablespoons of Unmitigated Bullshit

And what do you get? You get Kevin Drum's Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us?

This is a story about the future. Not the unhappy future, the one where climate change turns the planet into a cinder or we all die in a global nuclear war. This is the happy version.

It's the one where computers keep getting smarter and smarter, and clever engineers keep building better and better robots. By 2040, computers the size of a softball are as smart as human beings. Smarter, in fact. Plus they're computers: They never get tired, they're never ill-tempered, they never make mistakes, and they have instant access to all of human knowledge.

The result is paradise ↑

Global warming is a problem of the past because computers have figured out how to generate limitless amounts of green energy and intelligent robots have tirelessly built the infrastructure to deliver it to our homes. No one needs to work anymore. Robots can do everything humans can do, and they do it uncomplainingly, 24 hours a day. Some things remain scarce—beachfront property in Malibu, original Rembrandts—but thanks to super-efficient use of natural resources and massive recycling, scarcity of ordinary consumer goods is a thing of the past. Our days are spent however we please, perhaps in study, perhaps playing video games. It's up to us.

Drum can't be serious! Or is he?

Maybe you think I'm pulling your leg here. Or being archly ironic. After all, this does have a bit of a rose-colored tint to it, doesn't it? Like something from The Jetsons or the cover of Wired. That would hardly be a surprising reaction. Computer scientists have been predicting the imminent rise of machine intelligence since at least 1956, when the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence gave the field its name, and there are only so many times you can cry wolf.

Today, a full seven decades after the birth of the computer, all we have are iPhones, Microsoft Word, and in-dash navigation. You could be excused for thinking that computers that truly match the human brain are a ridiculous pipe dream.

But they're not. It's true that we've made far slower progress toward real artificial intelligence than we once thought, but that's for a very simple and very human reason: Early computer scientists grossly underestimated the power of the human brain and the difficulty of emulating one.

It turns out that this is a very, very hard problem, sort of like filling up Lake Michigan one drop at a time. In fact, not just sort of like. It's exactly like filling up Lake Michigan one drop at a time. If you want to understand the future of computing, it's essential to understand this.

Drum then goes on to explain that, because of Moore's Law, "which famously estimates that computing power doubles approximately every 18 months," computers have become more and more powerful (in terms of calculations per second). In so far as this growth has been exponential, we can look forward to the day in which machines are computationally more powerful than the human brain (whatever that means).

In other words, just as it took us until 2025 to fill up Lake Michigan, the simple exponential curve of Moore's Law suggests it's going to take us until 2025 to build a computer with the processing power of the human brain. And it's going to happen the same way: For the first 70 years, it will seem as if nothing is happening, even though we're doubling our progress every 18 months. Then, in the final 15 years, seemingly out of nowhere, we'll finish the job.

And that's exactly where we are.

Drum imagines, like the "scientists" whose "thinking" his essay is based upon, that an enormous number of calculations per second makes computers "smarter" than humans, as if humans are merely calculating machines without creativity, consciousness—however limited—and characteristic behaviors. (Economists often make the same mistake.)

Suppose we are "successful" in some sense. Does that mean that these massively powerful computers will be even more delusional, even more rapacious, even more irrational, and even more untrustworthy than humans are?

So much for "smarter"

Drum admits there are a few gotchas.

We also probably have to break lots of barriers in our knowledge of neuroscience before we can write the software that does all the things a human brain can do.

God only knows we really don't want to write software which does all the things the human brain does, right?

More seriously, computers run software. Software which is designed by humans. Computers do what they're told. If that software is machine learning software, computers learn what's possible to learn according to its rules (algorithms). And software requires data. That data is typically provided by humans. The machines can't create their own data. They must be fed the data.

In short, computers can't make just shit up like humans do.

If you give computers (robots) sensory awareness algorithms, the data acquired that way will be just as good as the algorithms humans wrote which acquires it. And then, that "sensory" data must be smoothly integrated with the "robot brain" in a way which emulates, and according to Drum, surpasses the way humans do it.

There is some hope here. I think it's entirely feasible to build a robot whose intelligence surpasses that of Paul Krugman. Maybe before a decade from now

Are you starting to get the picture? This is not Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines. That was a movie. It was made in Hollywood. It was made by humans. As humans are wont to do, that movie was made to make money by making it appealing to other humans, including people like Kevin Drum.

Thus we can safely say that Drum's vision of the future is entirely a product of a normally functioning  human brain. In this case, Kevin Drum's brain. His software and his wetware.

In short, the functionality which evolved from this guy over approximately the last 1.7 million years.

Homo erectus, or maybe Homo ergaster (Africa)

And here's Kevin Drum.

As they might say at the end of the movie, all similarities to extinct human ancestors are unintentional and purely coincidental

Comments

[Rumor]

Oh, now I see. We've moved on from "we'll figure out the technology to solve climate change!" to "we'll invent robots who will figure out the technology to solve climate change."

I don't have enough swear words right now. I need more.