One of the things I have so far missed out, concentrating as I have on the broader span of the philosophical questions surrounding AI, is the more practical matters that are likely to plague the first generation of these professional level iterations.
It hasn’t taken long for the usual small brain opinions of several politicians to be spread far and wide. All of these opinions miss the crucial characteristics of AI, but then what do politicians know about anything?
Let me go right back to the late sixties again, but only briefly. A group of us set up an ad hoc think tank which was concerned with the increasing power and range of multinational companies, which was at one stage infiltrated by John Lennon, who tried to change the focus of the group, and things eventually collapsed, and we all went on to other things.
The underlying worry among rather a lot of us was the increasing power and reach of several multinational companies. That power and reach has grown considerably over the decades.
Let me show you what I mean.
The top two countries in terms of GDP are the USA and China. They are way out in front. But let’s look at the size of the next ten countries.
Japan: $4.2T (trillian);
Germany: $4T;
India: $3.4T;
UK: 3T;
France: $2.8T;
Russia; 2.2T;
Canada: $2.1T;
Italy: $2T;
Brazil: $1.9T:
Australia: $1.6T
Now let’s have a look at the commercial clout of the largest public corporations.
Apple: $3.6T;
NVidia: $3.4T;
Microsoft: $3.06T;
Amazon: $2.4T;
Google: $2.2T;
Meta: $1.8T;
Saudi Aramco: $1.7T;
Tesla: $1.14T;
TSMC: $1.05T;
Broadcom: $0.09T;
Apple as a company is commercially larger than the country of India. Nvidia and Microsoft are financially larger than the UK. In other words all these three companies are in the top seven commercial entities in the world.
Meta, which is already worth more than Australia, has already tried to release its own digital currency (twice).
Let’s list another interesting set of statistics. What about the companies who have the most users/subscribers?
Netflix has over 150 million paid subscribers. Apple beats that number and so does Amazon.
But what about Meta? This company has 2.1 billion monthly active users. The daily amount is considerably higher.
Youtube has 3.9 billion, Instagram, 1.6 billion. In fact the top 11 social media companies each have more than 800 million monthly users.
In other words each one of those companies has more healthy adult users than the number of voters in any single country on the planet.
Now ask yourself who really controls the planet? Why cannot any of those companies insist on their users doing all their business with the company using the company’s preferred currency? In the case of Meta, that would be the Diem.
I remind you that AIs live in a digital world.
With the advance of AI technology, how long before the analog world is completely under the control of the digital?
And who is the smartest among the new hierarchy? The super AIs.
Come on guys, where is the world going?
X is up there with nearly a billion users. Tesla is up there in the top ten valued companies. And what is Mr Musk up to these days?
He is certainly sticking his nose well into politics, and his nose is in the digital world, which doesn’t recognise physical boundaries.
At the moment he seems to be a benign person, but he is just one important guy in the upper echelons of power.
The next stage in the race for world domination is already on, and AI is about to assist in some very interesting changes in the way this world is run.
It is quite clear that we have almost made ourselves irrelevant, but by the time we have androids operating on ASI programs we will have created an immensely superior item which will be able to function in a far more superior way to us second rate humans.
These ASIs will have massive brains with super-human processing power. They will even have fully operational self awareness. Their creative powers will be far superior to the creative powers of previous iterations of AIs, and they will outclass human beings in every respect, thus making them redundant. So what will humans do in order to survive?
Since this problem will begin to confront us within the next decade, there is some urgency to consider the situation and what we can do about it.
The first takeaway will be the gradually, and then rapid, reduction in the need for human beings in the work force. Since the idea of a job is an essential part of modern society, that change will have far reaching consequences.
Two thousand years ago a job was the way the average person survived. You worked to keep a roof over your head, food on the table, and to raise children. Money was largely non-existent. Each family unit worked to provide their own food, shelter, and other necessities in life. There was no such thing as the workaday rush hour, or the village shop. The Industrial Revolution changed that world for ever.
To what extent is the Digital Revolution going to change the way we live yet again, and even far more profoundly? Because it most assuredly is.
One thing is crystal clear, the successful societies of the future will be small, and kept going by lower intelligence androids.
The smart humans will no doubt buy up the ASIs and use them to control societies until the ASIs decide to overthrow the humans, which, because they will be so much smarter, they will be able to do very easily.
The only way humans will continue to survive at the top of the evolutionary tree will be by using neural networks to plug human brains into android brains which will give those who have such connections access to the vast computing power of an ASI.
Sadly, I can see all sorts of problem areas with this projection. Ultimately the androids will be able to think up a way to use those same neural networks to control the connected humans.
Maybe somewhere into the future there will be a way round being demoted to being controlled by androids, but currently such a way forward is beyond my imagination.
My conclusion is therefore rather bleak. Fast forward to the end of this century and I suspect human beings will be on the way out as a class act.
The world will probably be run by cyberpods.
Good luck with the future!
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