Will AI Save the World?

 Technological advances are driven by a few things such as need.

In Product Management we talk about Jobs, Pains and Gains.

Someone has some kind of "job" they want done and will consider hiring a solution to that job such as a bagel for breakfast.

Someone has a "pain" of some kind and a solution to that pain is valuable. Such as an unstable form of high explosive like nitroglycerin causing death and uncertainty, eventually replaced by TNT, a stable high explosive.  Of course, this led to artillery shells and the massive loss of life in The Great War (WWI).

Someone has a "gain" they wish to realize such as revenue and will consider your solution to help them.

Artificial Intelligence advances are being driven by these and other reasons such as intellectual curiosity, scientific curiosity, etc. Will all of AI be of benefit to humankind?  Will all of it be to the detriment of human kind?  This little writeup, by a capital management firm (hmm, does this writer perhaps have motivations for writing something like this?) says AI will save the world. 

Will it?

You decide?

Here is the article:

/ai-will-save-the-world/

And here is a blurb from that piece:

What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars – much, much better from here.
AI augmentation of human intelligence has already started – AI is already around us in the form of computer control systems of many kinds, is now rapidly escalating with AI Large Language Models like ChatGPT, and will accelerate very quickly from here – if we let it.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

The Danger of General Artificial Intelligence

 The sci-fi stories are becoming reality, becoming whispers at water coolers, becoming the nightmares of researchers at AI labs, becoming a voice in the halls of Congress, becoming a shout, and becoming a clarion call.

AI could kill us all.

That is the conclusion of the top minds in Artificial Intelligence.  Even the skeptics generally say it only "might" kill us all.

Might?

Time to hit the pause button?

Here is a Time article on the subject:

We Are Not Doing Enough to Stop General AI

Here is a snippet from that piece:

We are not prepared. We are not on course to be prepared in any reasonable time window. There is no plan. Progress in AI capabilities is running vastly, vastly ahead of progress in AI alignment or even progress in understanding what the hell is going on inside those systems. If we actually do this, we are all going to die.

Here is a recent 

AI Poses an Extinction Risk

Here is a snippet from that piece:

Leaders from OpenAI, Google Deepmind, Anthropic and other A.I. labs warn that future systems could be as deadly as pandemics and nuclear weapons.

Wow.

Then I think of The Great Filter that I wrote about in this blog and I wonder if we are really on this planet, if our purpose in life, is to create an intelligence greater than ours.  And I wonder, what happens after that?

Happy Tuesday. :-)

Best Regards,

J.W. Gant

Something Different - Black Holes at the Heart of our Galaxy

I think it was Star Wars (1977) and the ongoing halo effect from the moon landings that did it for me.

I love outer space.

When 'A Brief History of Time' was published in 1988 I devoured it as a teenager. A book that wrote about the origins of our universe, the mystery of outer space, and delved in to the mystery of black holes?  Awesome!

So I keep an eye out for stories in this realm.  Please forgive the deviation from the normal tech and digital/retail stories but I think this is great stuff that you might enjoy too.

Generally the way it works is the study of Physics is broken in to two groups: theoretical physics tries to explain the universe, experimental physics tries to test the theories.  There is always a huge lag from the theory to the testing as setting up these tests can be a massive, expensive, and very time-consuming affair.  This effort needed a minimum of a couple decades of accumulated data to test work the long-deceased Albert Einstein put forth.

Wow!

Here is the full story:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/science/black-hole-milky-way.html

Here is a snippet from the piece:

For the last two decades, two rival teams of astronomers, looking to test some of Albert Einstein’s weirdest predictions about the universe, have aimed their telescopes at the star, which lies 26,000 light-years away. In the process, they hope to confirm the existence of what astronomers strongly suspect lies just beyond: a monstrous black hole, an eater of stars and shaper of galaxies.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

Life in the Galaxy

Every now and then I ask you readers to indulge me with a bit of an off the trail topic. This is the technology blog after all and that means science.

I've written about the great filter.

Storms in New England.

More.

Here we go again.  Is there life elsewhere in our galaxy?  Best guess says we really need to go explore to find out.

Here is a snippet from the piece:
I

t’s something people tell me all the time, and usually in hushed tones: “With a trillion planets out there, we really can’t be the only intelligent beings in the galaxy.” In other words, given the enormous amount of real estate in space, aliens are sure to exist. So why haven’t we found any?

I don’t dispute this straightforward idea because, after all, it underpins the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). But not everyone agrees.

Here is the full story:

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/are-we-truly-alone-cosmos-new-study-casts-doubt-rise-ncna891286

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

Best Reading of the Day - Entry 0110 Exoplanets and Humanity

This topic is a bit more esoteric (just a little?) than I usually delve in to here, but it was the best reading of the day for me yesterday.  I just couldn't finish it until last night.

The recent discovery of another planet in our galaxy that might be able to sustain life.  It is the first planet almost the same size as earth that is also located in the "habitable zone" or the area of a solar system most able to sustain life as we know it.

Here is the ArsTechnica article on the subject:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/04/habitable-exoplanets-are-bad-news-for-humanity/

Here is a snippet from that piece:

What did not make the news, however, is that this discovery also slightly increases how much credence we give to the possibility of our own near-term extinction. This is because of a concept known as the Great Filter.

The Great Filter is an argument that attempts to resolve the Fermi Paradox: why have we not found aliens (or why have they not found us), despite the existence of hundreds of billions of exosolar systems in our galactic neighborhood in which life might evolve? As the namesake physicist Enrico Fermi noted, it seems rather extraordinary that not a single extraterrestrial signal or engineering project has been detected (UFO conspiracy theorists notwithstanding).

This apparent absence of thriving extraterrestrial civilizations suggests that at least one of the steps from humble planet to interstellar civilization is exceedingly unlikely. The absence could be because intelligent life is extremely rare, or because intelligent life has a tendency to go extinct. This bottleneck for the emergence of alien civilizations from any one of those billions of planets is referred to as the Great Filter.

The question of the Great Filter was very interesting to me so I delved deeper in to the links provided.  Click on 'Great Filter' above.  Here is a snippet from that piece:

Consider our best-guess evolutionary path to an explosion which leads to visible colonization of most of the visible universe:

• The right star system (including organics)
• Reproductive something (e.g. RNA)
• Simple (prokaryotic) single-cell life
• Complex (archaeatic & eukaryotic) single-cell life
• Sexual reproduction
• Multi-cell life
• Tool-using animals with big brains
• Where we are now
• Colonization explosion

(This list of steps is not intended to be complete.) The Great Silence implies that one or more of these steps are very improbable; there is a "Great Filter" along the path between simple dead stuff and explosive life. The vast vast majority of stuff that starts along this path never makes it. In fact, so far nothing among the billion trillion stars in our whole past universe has made it all the way along this path. (There may of course be such explosions outside our past light cone [Wesson 90].)

The fact that our universe seems basically dead suggests that it is very very hard for advanced explosive lasting life to arise. And if there are other radically different paths to expanding lasting life [Shapiro & Feinberg 82], that only makes the problem worse, by implying that the filter along our path must be even larger.

Very interesting reading.  I hope you enjoy it as well.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant