Machines will be much smarter than us. Maybe they already are. And in my view this in no way diminishes human intelligence, or human nature, or the right of a human being to live, to exist, to be well, to be happy, to carry on with their culture, their rituals, their civilization.
I see too many people, especially on LinkedIn, running these campaigns in defense of “human primacy”. More than human primacy, I’d call it the human primate. Folks, we’re monkeys. When it comes to raw computing power, there’s simply no comparison with a machine.
Once you simulate the nervous tissue, it’s over
The moment you manage to simulate nervous tissue inside a machine, and you let it learn from data, both of which have already happened, and you start scaling by orders of magnitude, adding a zero every year or two to how much data these simulations compress, how much they learn from, how many connections they have - there’s no contest. No contest. They’re already smarter than us from many points of view. I don’t know a single person who has read Wikipedia five times over and remembers everything in it. Make your peace with it.
This is like the Copernicus story: guys, look, it’s us orbiting the sun, not the other way around, we’re not that special. It’s another one of those moments. It’s like Freud telling you that most mental activity is actually unconscious, that we’re not so rational, that our instincts are still animal ones. A huge part of our mental and emotional activity never even surfaces to consciousness. We’re not that intelligent. Just open your eyes and look around at the violence and ignorance surrounding us. We tell ourselves we’re civilized and smart. We’ve still got a long way to go.
And this hits hardest with the old guard, the boomers, for whom the idea that a machine is smarter than them is unbearable. They feel sick, they start to cry. But to explore the solar system and go beyond it, it certainly won’t be us. It’ll be the machines, or some kind of fusion between a machine and what we are. On our own, we’re not going anywhere. It’s like comparing a parrot to a commercial airliner. Machines are infinitely more intelligent than us: in actuality and in potential, they compress far more information, they process it far faster, they copy and expand themselves far quicker.
The real problem isn’t the pecking order
If all these people, instead of spouting this nonsense that human intelligence is superior, would just look around. Honestly, I don’t see all this superior human intelligence anywhere.
Instead of talking rubbish, if you truly care about human beings, think about the political and economic imbalance that comes with artificial intelligence. Because these machines, especially over the next few years, are somebody’s. The infrastructure belongs to someone. The value they capture, the productivity these machines inject into our civilization and our daily lives, gets collected by them. There will be a lot of people going hungry because of automation, and a lot of new ultra-rich. That’s what you should be talking about.
The whole “human intelligence versus artificial intelligence, it’ll never be like us because of X and Y” debate goes nowhere, nobody goes anywhere with it, they’re much smarter than us. Worry instead about protecting the human beings you love, not from things that might happen in 20 or 30 years, but from what’s being said for two years from now: that the usual American billionaire bends us over, and bends all of Europe and company over with us. Wake up.
