Artificial intelligence without (necessarily) using computers
Are corporations artificial intelligences? How about states? How about my local bowling team?
December 1, 2016 — January 21, 2025
Suspiciously similar content
Is superintelligence already here, but composed of people? Are AI the same kind of things as are human superorganisms? Should the difficulties of bureaucracy be regarded as a foretaste for the difficulties of information states? Are the alignment problems of machines similar to the alignment problems of institutions?
The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone:
The Singularity has happened; we call it “the industrial revolution” or “the long nineteenth century”. It was over by the close of 1918.
Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses)? Check.
Massive, profoundly disorienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality, and social organisation? Check.
Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check.
Embrace of the fusion of humanity and machines? Check.
Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, “the coldest of all cold monsters?” Check; we call them “the self-regulating market system” and “modern bureaucracies” (public or private), and they treat men and women, even those whose minds and bodies instantiate them, like straw dogs.
An implacable drive on the part of those networks to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their own sphere? Check. (“Drive” is the best I can do; words like “agenda” or “purpose” are too anthropomorphic, and fail to acknowledge the radical novelty and strangeness of these assemblages, which are not even intelligent, as we experience intelligence, yet ceaselessly calculating.)
Why, then, since the Singularity is so plainly, even intrusively, visible in our past, does science fiction persist in placing a pale mirage of it in our future? Perhaps: the owl of Minerva flies at dusk; and we are in the late afternoon, fitfully dreaming of the half-glimpsed events of the day, waiting for the stars to come out.
See also big history.
1 Incoming
Ian Morris on whether deep history says we’re heading for an intelligence explosion
Wong and Bartlett (2022)
we hypothesize that once a planetary civilization transitions into a state that can be described as one virtually connected global city, it will face an ‘asymptotic burnout’, an ultimate crisis where the singularity-interval time scale becomes smaller than the time scale of innovation. If a civilization develops the capability to understand its own trajectory, it will have a window of time to affect a fundamental change to prioritize long-term homeostasis and well-being over unyielding growth—a consciously induced trajectory change or ‘homeostatic awakening’. We propose a new resolution to the Fermi paradox: civilizations either collapse from burnout or redirect themselves to prioritising homeostasis, a state where cosmic expansion is no longer a goal, making them difficult to detect remotely.
Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi: Shoggoths amongst us connects AIs to cosmic horror to institutions.