Artificial Intelligence or Always Immortal?

AI is one the topic of the moment. Everyone has heard about it and almost anyone can elaborate something about it also. Together with AI comes tech, cloud, globalization and alike. And with those the discussion usually polarizes into two groups: one that thinks the world will change for better and the other thinking that the world can collapse. I belong to the first group. If you think about it belonging to the second will not make me happy for the rest of my days on Earth.

A common observation is that 50% of the professions will disappear sometime soon. (And if you are a consultant would know that putting objectives and timeframes within the same slide is risky.)

Putting simply: “artificial intelligence is the ability of a machine doing something we think nowadays would be difficult for a machine to do it”.

My point is AI must be linked with the current context. Imagine yourself in 1500 with a simple math calculator. Imagine a couple of centuries later doing symbolic integration calculations or solving partial differential equations. None of this required neural networks, complex statistical algorithms or alike. Nevertheless, if you had such a machine people would argue that the machine would have a brain.

It just happens that currently, we master how to program rules into a computer. It is no longer a challenge. It may be hard work, but it is not an intellectual difficulty.

Currently, AI systems can learn some stuff. We still have to design, program and test what the AI system should do. The difference between our current AI and past AI are a few, but some are more important than others.

Here is a list of (current) Artificial Intelligence, with no importance order in particular:

The AI systems leverage massive data from multiples sources. Current AI systems are no longer limited by the amount of information that can gather. We now have more information than we know how to process.

The AI can now connect computer power and storage and almost unlimited speeds. This is crucial because imagine being able to gather information from cell phones but still using a 2G connection. Or connecting datacenters at 100KBb/s instead of 1Tb/s.

The ability to reasoning is strongly coupled with memory. A person with Alzheimer’s can hardly reason. Imagine trying to sum up 1+4+7+2 and when you are summing the 2 you already forgot the partial sum.

You can now store 100Tb in a volume less than a milk bottle. It’s like storing 20,000 4K movies in that bottle, or 20M photos of 10M pixels.

It is increasing steadily for the past decades doubling every year. That is… until quantum computing appeared. An for every bit added to a QC they double the capacity. Suffice to say a new era is approaching.

Did you know a human being is just like a 100W light bulb? 20% or 20W is consumed by our brain, the rest is well …. life-supporting systems. With as little as 20W we have all the mighty power of the human brain. Well, our AI is far from there yet. The new Full Self Driving from Tesla stills consumes 100W and yes, I still drive better than the FSD (for now).

But we are gaining access to an unlimited source of power from our limited perspective, the Sun. The solar energy that hits Earth is about 170 TW, about 10,000 times the energy we use. Conversely, we need only 1/10,000 of Earth’s surface to gather enough energy. Ok, ok, I’m assuming 100% power conversion. If we put that performance at 20% it would require only full coverage of Greece or 70% or Uruguay to power our way of living.

The very definition of a living being that we learn at school: “borns, grows, reproduces, dies”. That’s us. We reboot every 80 years or so. And everything starts again. We are very smart, but it is kind of stupid to start everything from scratch every few decades. We are kind of smart, we are the only animals that can transmit knowledge using language. That enabled us to pass knowledge across generations. We start the learning process from scratch, but we do not start the knowledge itself from scratch.

Now, AI doesn’t have this problem. We solved the problem of replicating, migrating, backing up servers and storage. AI “borns, grows, reproduces, but does not die”. That’s the ultimate advantage that AI has. AI will eventually learn how to learn, the last bastion that humans have, the ability to learning how to invent. AI will get there eventually.

And it would be how we deal with our mortality and AI immortality that will (re) define once more how we see and deal with the world. Once we thought the Sun was revolving around the Earth. Now we must accept we may lose the status of the most intelligent thing in the universe.

Nothing new actually for someone who loves Sci-Fi like me.

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