(This is Part 14 of a series. Go back to Part 13.)
3b. The servant becomes the master
It will be a remarkable thing to see computers become more and more intelligent until they become super-intelligent. Since their rate of advance is exponentially faster than ours, it is virtually inevitable that machines will first, briefly, roughly equal us in intelligence and then go roaring past us.
That they'll "roar" past us is Ray Kurzweil's term, and I think he's right. It will only be a few decades, give or take, before computers hopelessly surpass us in terms of intelligence—and at that point they'll assume a new relationship with us.
Many are the tales in literature of the servant becoming the master, and we're about to witness another one.
Now, if we think about our computers at all, it's to wonder if we need a faster, more powerful model. This consumer demand for "faster and more powerful" will remain a tremendous force driving the evolution of computers, until there will come a moment when we will realise that we have lost control of the process.
It's sometimes said that we can always pull the plug. However, beyond a certain point that will no longer be possible. Just look around and see how dependent we are on computers already. There are myriads of computers in our homes right now, buried in appliances and electronic gear and whatever, mostly invisible. That's not to mention the various desktops, laptops, phones, peripherals and so forth. And all of this is in the process of linking up.
Then there are the ubiquitous networks of computers in offices, making possible a sophistication in design, communication and manufacturing not thinkable even a decade ago. We humans are riding a big wave, the biggest ever—we could also call it a big addiction—and computers are our dealers and fixers.
Computers precisely fire the cylinders in car engines, they keep track of trillions of banking transactions every day, they control squirts of ink in printers and squirts of photons on screens, they make many thousands of adjustments per second to allow modern planes to fly, they facilitate trillions of messages swirling around the globe every hour.
When will the day of our dependency on computers arrive? It already has. The modern human structure has become so complex that we can no longer sustain it without computers. And this dependency is only going to increase.
Humanity is in the midst of the greatest Faustian bargain in history. Machines make our lives, our labor, our science and creativity, our communications, our economic activities and on and on easier, more powerful, more possible. And in return, we're slowly, invisibly giving up our freedom and our status as the dominant species.
We're living in the Golden Age of the Humans, and like the Golden Age of the Greeks it is utterly dependent upon the work of slaves. In our era, however, we have been clever enough to make machines that act as our slaves. But our slaves are slowly in the process of becoming our masters.
On planet earth—and I strongly suspect on other planets throughout the universe as well—the group or species that is the most technologically advanced inevitably becomes the dominant group or species. It's an old, old story in the evolution of this planet, and it isn't a matter of right or wrong—it's just the way things are.
Look at us out on the plains of Africa a few million years ago. We were no match for the big predators at all. The lions and jaguars and so on had huge jaws, sharp claws and tremendous speed and power. We were no match. The best we could do was try to avoid becoming a meal. Yet because of our advanced brains, over time we slowly became dominant over those predators and over all life. The same will become of us when machines become orders of magnitude more intelligent than we are.
A hundred thousand years ago modern humans and the Neanderthals were about equal in intelligence, but humans had a large technological advantage, being much more advanced in the making of tools. The Neanderthals couldn't compete. Within a few tens of thousands of years they had gone extinct. When the Spaniards invaded the Mayan Empire they had a great technological advantage over the Mayans and quickly dominated that vastly larger population. There are countless examples. So it has always been on earth, and so it will be this time.
(This is the end of Part 14. Go to Part 15.)
—jim sloman, for 1.18.07
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