It is not overstating to say that humanity is at a crossroads.
It has been long anticipated, and goes by several names: the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Second Machine Age. And, in the words of US statesman Henry Kissinger and his co-author, technologist Eric Schmidt, the Age of AI.
Artificial Intelligence is here. And it is already making its way deep into our lives, in our homes and our workplaces and our vehicles, in our businesses, our economy, our government, and our communication with others. It has, in just a few years, utterly infiltrated our human reality.
This infiltration in fact began quite some time ago. AI has existed for almost three generations, has been practical for two, and has been commercially present for one. But it never really made it onto our radar then, because it didn’t make a particularly prominent splash – nothing compared to the arrival of the Internet or the proliferation of social media.
But about 10 years ago, AI did something that sci-fi writers and futurists and savvy technologists had long predicted: it achieved, and then surpassed, human competence.
It did so when we perfected deep learning, a type of machine learning that mimics the workings of the human brain. With this new variety of AI, we could now do what human brains do best – pattern recognition – with greater depth and efficiency than ever before. Not just at human levels, but at superhuman levels.
“This is an epochal moment,” said technologist Eric Schmidt. “AI is going to change the world in the same way the Renaissance did 400 years ago.
“The Age of AI will be a new phase of history,” he went on, “similar to the Renaissance. What happened in the Renaissance – the Age of Reason – was all of a sudden people had an idea that human thought was supreme, and that you could be critical, and you could think things through. We’re about to go through the same kind of change, because we’ve never seen another non-human intelligence with a similar ability as our own – and, in some cases, much smarter.”1
This alone should warrant the attention of every man, woman, and young person out there. Just as the Renaissance led to entirely new models for human society, so will AI shred the social frameworks and prevalent worldviews of these past 400 years, making way for new ones. There’s no stopping it.
This singular shift overshadows even the Renaissance, it must be recognized: for the first time in all of time and history, there is an intelligence on this world that equals our own. Up this point, it’s just been us – and, for all our mistakes, we didn’t have to worry about some other beings overtaking us.
That’s no longer true.
To be sure, AI in its present form can wildly outperform us in a growing array of tasks, but it can only do so narrowly – one task at a time. There isn’t yet an AI out there with superhuman performance across a range of tasks as vast as the typical human being can accomplish. But that’s just a matter of time.
The sci-fi writers and the futurists saw it coming long ago, and realized that it would, indeed, change everything – and fast. There will be more change over the next two decades, from here in 2023 through the 2040s, than there has been in centuries. And we will bear witness to it all. It will be as though aliens smarter than ourselves have arrived, and we must adapt to their inscrutable actions and unfathomable ways of thinking.
We’ll handle it well or we’ll handle it badly, and we’ll see what we’ll see. Both possibilities are explored below.
But as we fall into this singularity, utterly uncertain as to what awaits on the other side, we must – before anything else! - acquiesce to the reality that no matter the outcome, our way of life as it has been will soon be ended, and we will have to adapt. Or else.
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