Machine Labor, AI, and the Technological Singularity

Technology is developing faster now than ever before, increasing speed exponentially. Inventions like the telephone, computers, and the Internet make sharing information quicker and more convenient than ever. This is the definition of collective intelligence, when individuals connect with each other to create a network of intelligence. But this can only take us so far, right? What happens when we create something smarter than us? What happens when machines take over?

First of all, this isn't science fiction. This is happening right now. People program machines that perform specific tasks, mainly in manufacturing. These are taking many people's real jobs right now. CGP Grey made an amazing video talking about the social and economic consequences of machines taking over human labor. To summarize, a robot can take your job no matter what it is. This doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, it's just another economic revolution similar to the industrial revolution. There will be problems because we don't know how to deal with it, but we will eventually. The better prepared we are the easier the transition will be.

Many companies are currently working on software that doesn't just perform specific tasks, but actually learns. This is the growing field of artificial intelligence, which aims to create software that gets better over time through learning from its mistakes. Just yesterday Google announced an update to Gmail which can read an email and provide three contextually generated responses to that email. This seems simple at first, but when you consider that this is a machine generating human-like responses to human input, and then learning to get better, it's really incredible.

But at what point does a machine generating a human-like response turn into actual thought and feeling? After all, the human brain is just like one incredibly intricate computer. The Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 aims to answer that question. The test is simple, a human compares the answers of a machine and a human and tries to reliably tell which one is the machine's answer. If the judge cannot reliably tell that one is the machine, it passes the test. So far, no AI has passed the test, but who knows just how much more learning an AI has to do to reach this status? It's inevitable.

The evolution of technology will not stop there. When I say evolution, I don't mean the biological definition. Evolution is extremely slow, taking thousands and thousands of years for there to be a major difference. Technology is advancing much faster than the rate of biological evolution. Eventually there will be the invention of an AI that sees flaws in itself and constantly improves, or creates other copies of itself that also improves themselves. This exponential explosion of AI-powered technological improvement is known as the technological singularity. The intelligence of such machines could grow to such a scale that humans would no longer be able to keep up, and be drowned out by the intense superiority of the constantly improving AI. There's no way to tell what humanity's role in this situation would be. All that's known is that by developing artificial intelligence, this conclusion is inevitable. The only questions are when, and if the AI will see us favorably.

While the chances of all of these happening are high so long as we continue at the rate of progress we're at, there's no telling whether they will be beneficial or not. I, for one, welcome our robot overlords.

Sources: Telegraph, CBC, Wikipedia