The Future Of Progress

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

Douglas Adams, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency"

Ever since the prehistoric times, humans created tools which were used to compensate for our disabilities and faults. The first spear was thrown because men were not fast enough to catch deers and not strong enough to face mammoths. The wheel was invented because there was a limit to how much and how far man (or their beasts) could carry loads, and even clothes were originally created to help us survive in punishing weather conditions.

Later on, more complicated tools and machines were created in order to empower people and make them more productive. New ways of providing energy to these machines made them even more powerful, useful and in many cases much deadlier. In the last 70 years a new breed of machines evolved, that were not created to improve man's physical abilities, but rather his mental ones: computers can calculate faster, memorize more accurately and retrieve those memories much better and faster than any person. No wonder many of us have several of these, often in our own pockets.

There are two common denominators to all of these machines, which includes even the most advanced ones: none of them can actually work for a sustained period of time without human intervention and all of them were invented by humans. Even the most advanced robots and the fastest computers still need us to survive, and advances in technology and science which enables the creation of even more complex machines is created solely by us, humans.

But can this situation change? We assume that the last advantage we have over machines is our brains, which are still many orders of magnitude faster than the most powerful supercomputer, not to mention other advantages we have like self-awareness. But let's face it: even now, there are many man-made systems that cannot be fully grasped by one person. To make matters even more interesting, we will reach a point in which computers will overtake us in terms of raw computing power. This day is actually not far - it will probably happen before the middle of the current century.

Computing power is not everything though and several advances in artificial intelligence will have to be made but as it often happened before, new inventions or new found power source led to new and unpredictable uses. This might just be the case with AI as well: more computer power will lead to more advanced algorithms which might eventually lead to increasingly sophisticated AI and even what many calls "Singularity" - the point where artificial intelligence will surpass ours.

The Singularity movement claims that at this point and on, man kind will not be able to determine his own future because the technological changes will occur so rapidly and decisions will be made by computers equipped with super-intelligence. They will be smarter, make better decisions and we will likely not understand their reasoning.

Sounds scary, isn't it? And why shouldn't we be afraid? Our pop culture feeds on this fear: "2001: Space Odyssey", "Terminator", "The Matrix" and even "1984" show us worlds ran by machines in which humans cannot control their faith and become slaves - but will this be the actual case? Are we that great at managing ourselves? How many decisions do politicians make each day that are based upon faulty logic, lack of information or petty interests? How come, despite our amazing advances, 1.5 billion people can hardly make a living?

We cannot predict the results of the Singularity assuming that it will happen, in the same way that no one could predict that the first thrown spear was the first step toward the moon landing or the wheel being the first step toward the Bugatti Veyron. So like any other historical milestone, we should be open-eyed about it but do not dismiss it.