So AI is advancing at a frighteningly rapid pace (and that’s the stuff we know about) and well-intentioned companies like DeepMind have created AI that is capable of teaching itself chess within the short span of 4 hours to then go on and annihilate biological grandmasters before dispensing with the remaining inorganic competition.
This ability to learn, as opposed to being programmed, and participate in domains thought to be exclusively human, like the arts, may be the most urgent threat to human existence. This is all happening, by the way, under the radar while those legislating our destinies are fighting about climate change.
Unlike past scientific advances that have been weaponized, this one will be out of our control. We will not be able to sign treaties when the slaughter, horror and suffering, or the threat thereof, compels a majority of us to control these weapons unless our inorganic counterparty develops a conscience (naturally it would have to be more advanced than our own) that compels it to pity and protect us. That’s when we will go the way of the whale.
That’s all to say that I recently delighted in a short story I read on Colossal a couple of days ago about a father who took a graph of his kid’s sleeping patterns and wove it into a blanket.
Human sleep (AI will not require this) reflected as binary data (blue is 0 or asleep; white is 1 or awake) emerging over time from chaos into a controlled pattern rendered visually by human hands through a substrate the functional purpose of which is to provide warmth for the biological source of the data.
This blanket could become a holy relic preserved by our descendants fighting to survive under AI’s dominion. Perhaps his son will lead the movement that prevents us from manifesting this destiny.
As a father who created things for my son when he was born, I am outdone and supremely impressed by Mr. Lee’s creativity and technical skill. Chapeau!
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