Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
So, I wanted to ask you another thing that I think is extremely interesting,
and that is about technological singularity.
I wanted to ask you to explain briefly what it is and where we are now and what
the perspectives are for the near future and for the far future.
Sure.
Human civilization was born 10.000 years ago, more or less, with the invention of agriculture
where little but important changes enabled us to produce excess food that increased
the population and increased our opportunity to look around and ask new questions,
As well as together with our invention of writing, these questions and the answers
we started to find could be spread and could be better understood by larger and larger groups.
The progressive accumulation of knowledge and new tools and the tools that are based
on the tools themselves is not something that is happening just now.
It is not something that is the invention of the 21st or 20th century,
it has been going on for a long, long time.
What is different is that while the effects of these cumulative changes have been
invisible within the lifetime of a single person before, since a couple of hundred years,
change has been happening fast enough for individuals to realize that it was actually going on.
If I were a farmer in the Middle Ages and I worked the land to grow the grain
and feed my family and pay the taxes and go to church and respect the local prince or king,
I would have had no way of realizing that there was change going on around me.
And my only hope would be in the afterlife. I would cling on my belief that if I did
certain things, I would be living a better life after I was dead.
The opportunity of making life better for one's children became something more than
not just the fable, because in the fables children always leave their families
and then they change their own lives by marrying a princess or something,
but that concretely a parent could do something that made the life of their children better
became apparent or started to become apparent a couple of hundred years ago.
About a hundred years ago what happened is that people started to say
Wait a minute, if I do something, things can become better for my own life,
not only the life of my children, my own life can be made better by something that I do
such as for example study, getting a university degree or move to a city or something like that.
And today, what we have is that at least theoretically everybody has the power
as individuals to do almost whatever they want in their personal lives, in their
professional careers, they can have multiple professional trajectories one after the other,
and the choices are enormous.
If you believe that the underlying forces of combining knowledge and new and new solutions
is not just a happenstance, and that it will continue the acceleration of change
is going to continue in the future as well.
Technological singularity is the moment in time when the tools of change themselves
become independent from the human actors.
And specifically, when what we call Artificial Intelligence, computer systems, software systems
that can analyze and solve problems on their own become feasible.
The reason why is because one of the interesting set of problems that these systems are going
to be able to analyze, understand and reintepret better and better, are going to be themselves.
Their capability for understanding themselves, introspection and redesigning the way they work
is going to be far greater than our attempts of understanding how our mind works,
how our emotions work, how we can find and organize societies that are more equal, more just.
And they will do it, per definition, without us, they will do it on their own.
The cycle of analyzis and reimplementation is going to continue at an accelerated pace
and the effects on the world of these accelerating cycles are hard to predict.
So the word singularity is there to represent that it is very difficult,
some say it is impossible, others say it is hard, but it is very very difficult
to predict how the world is going to look like, how the world is going to work
after that moment in time.
So where do you think we are now, exactly, in this kind of process?
Well, there are people who say it will never happen, that it is an illusion,
that either because of some physical or technological limits that we hit,
or because inherently it is beyond what we can achieve in terms of organizing complex systems,
we will not be able to design intelligent autonomous systems.
I think they are wrong. The phenomenon of intelligence is certainly very complex
and it is certainly not something that we fully understand today, but
it doesn't have anything that is inherently impossible to understand.
It is an expression of the laws of the universe and self-organizing systems,
whether they are stars that burn, or galaxies that swirl, or ecosystems that
are made up of thousands of different species, intelligence is also a phenomenon
that we can analyze, understand and then reinterpret. There were people who said we couldn't build airplanes.
There were people who said we couldn't go and travel in space.
And just as they were wrong, people who say we cannot build intelligent systems are
going to be proven wrong.
Just as airplanes don't resemble birds, artificial intelligences are not going to resemble humans.
When we interact we will find ways to understand each other, so there will be speaking
artificial intelligences that we can talk to and they will respond.
It will be important to find constructive ways to interact.
When birds and airplanes interact, that is very seldom constructive.
The bird dies, and the airplane gets damaged, or even crashes.
So, there are people who are already working on how to make sure that these systems
are going to peacefully coexist with humans.
Back to your question, one of the leading figures of the technological singularity thought space
or movement, if you want to call it, is Ray Kurzweil, and his prediction is that
the technological singularity is going to occur around 2045.
Whether it is 10 years before or 10 years after, for him it doesn't very much matter,
he would be very surprised if it were sooner,
and he would be also surprised if it would be much later.
To me, it doesn't even matter if it is in hundred years later, or two hundred years later.
The fact that it occurs is going to transform the universe, just as when we look out today
to the galactical plane, with our telescopes we are more and more clear in our understanding
in a larger and larger radius that there are no technological civilizations comparable
to that of Planet Earth and humanity today, as disturbing as this knowledge is
because being alone in the universe on one hand and having the responsibility of
preserving our planet and our civilization in order to achieve the opportunities that
we have is huge, of course, in a thousand years, when we will look out in the universe,
once the technological singularity has occurred, we will see a very very different world around us.
I think that's one of the things that people will just have to wait and see where it goes.
Well, actually billions of people are unaware of these predictions
and the transformative consequences that will be around them if it does occur,
there are milions of people who are aware of it and are passive in their expecting
for the good or the bad consequences that will occur, but there are thousands of people
or even tens of thousands of people who are very actively working either directly
or indirectly to bring ahead the changes that are going to be the premise for the singularity to occur.
If everybody were passive, then it wouldn't happen.