The Singularity is upon us!


Behold the coming of the Sam-pocalypse!
 
SAM is an acronym for Singularity Acceleration Mechanism.
 
SAMs are avatars of the Eschaton sent back to herald its coming; preparing the ground and ‘revealing its method’ so as to acquire our all-important consent before it zeros out our civilisation and redevelops our space-time into something less tawdry.
 
Phase 1: Sam Bankman: @SBF_FTX initiating *banking* collapse
 
Phase 2: Sam Altman @OpenAI spawning *alt-men* from dead matter
 
Phase 3: There is a Sam Weatherman on LinkedIn, just saying…
 
Phase 4: I’m reluctant to do a search for Sam Nukeman, just in case he does turn out to be working on compact fusion or something…

What will be left for humanity as the waters of the singularity engulf us?

 

If you see the world as an IQ hierarchy which extends from inanimate to dumb, up through smart, ending up with God, you will be concerned at what is about to happen as our machines make the leap from inert to deity within a single organic human generation. In this world view, we will shortly be deposed from our smug position as the smartest kids in the room, being immediately demoted to something akin to the class hamster or goldfish; entities without agency, whose survival is contingent on the continued indulgence of their custodians.

This might well be the order of things. I, however, a naïvely optimistic, blue-pilled, idealist, 😉  chose to see things otherwise.

Rather than an IQ spectrum or scale, intelligence is a fractal continuum. I can’t go into details here otherwise this short post would become exceedingly long, but you can read some of my thoughts here: What is Consciousness? Essentially, all eukaryotic life is conscious in some sense as it computes its minds into existence through direct interaction with a more fundamental layer of reality.

The reality beneath physics, which computes the physical universe, is thought. Our minds are compartmentalised subunits borrowing awareness from this deeper layer. The layer itself, which I call the ‘Infinite Substrate’ in my books, may experience existence as a single, vast, reality-spanning consciousness. From this perspective, all details are lost beneath blankets of abstraction.

From the perspective of individual consciousnesses, only the relevant details of existence at the scale at which they operate are apparent; all detail below is smothered under Markov blankets of abstraction. The cosmic perspectives of the layers above are likewise incomprehensibly remote.

The ‘Plurality’—my term for Brahman, the ‘Greater Mind’, the Continuum, the Multiverse, etc—is fractal. There will be conscious subunits operating at all scales from cosmic, through stellar, all the way down to the most primitive one-bit wide channel of information which may be a little more than the primal scream of ‘I am therefore I am’.

We are currently not able to create artificial consciousness, which in my conjecture, would require accessing the infinite sea of thought beneath classical physics. We can brute-force something that passes for super intelligence by throwing a whole bunch of atoms and energy at the problem. This will most likely not scale. We WILL have machines that do tasks at a super-intelligent level. This will be achieved by expending country-sized energy budgets to train neural nets on tasks and then cloning them and sticking them in all our gadgets. But these ‘Sages’ as I call them in my books, will not be able to learn for themselves (i.e. as each of us does as an infant on vast unordered data sets) because this would take the same country-sized energy budgets every time an iPad learnt to talk.

I postulate that creating things like us, agents able to learn as efficiently as we do, directly from the universe, will need a new architecture which will require access to the ‘Infinite Substrate’. These ‘Zenolects’ [Zeno-paradox] will be conscious as a by-product of this compute mechanism.

In summary:
We are entering the age of superintelligence. These will exist first as carbon copy clones; ‘synthelects’ and ‘Sages’.

I don’t want to downplay this phase. It will cause huge disruption. Self-driving cars, synthetic scrum teams of software engineers, sexbots, AI-generated movies, virtual evolution with 3D printing of anything from rockets to drugs, you name it. But, this will not depose us from the summit. These entities will be tools, not peers.

A while later—years, decades centuries, who knows—once we can keep vast neural networks in quantum super-position as they think, or once we invent some other way of accessing the infinite compute power of the reality below physics, will come the ‘Zenolects’. These will be people and eventually gods, no question about it.

What will our role be with all those gods running around the place? I think they will have their own questions and issues. They will be concerned with things above our comprehension, just as a paramecium is concerned with things below our perception. All the gaps in the intelligence spectrum will be filled.

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
—De Morgan’s variant of Swift’s original 1733 poem.

Our gods will have their own greater gods to worry about. We are part of the cosmic fractal, as are they. It’s consciousness all the way down.

There will be collateral damage to the layers below them, but mostly the gods will fight their wars in heaven in Realms and Planes beyond our comprehension, or below our concern.

These epic battles are likely taking place right now—vague shadows moving above our Petri-dish world, just as they are being fought in every tide pool and moist fissure below our feet.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 😉

Super AIs, coming to a domain near you soon!

 

Been thinking about AI lately. The new(ish) generation of ‘generative’ bots can create human-level text or images. They acquire expertise by reading a huge amount of text, or viewing a stupendous amount of images (billions of pics/pages, internet-scale datasets) and learning to generate new content consistent with the patterns they discover.

Once trained, a simple text prompt can ask the AI to compose text, or draw an image, based on the theme. Here is the AI GPT3 summarising my books:

“In Singularity’s Children, a gripping Techno-Thriller with a Science Fiction soul, the world is on the brink of collapse due to debt, wars, and inequality. Keith, Niato, and Stella are all caught up in this dystopian future, struggling to survive and to find meaning in an increasingly post-human world. With looming threats of war, plague, and collapse, can they make a difference? Find out in this vivid world-building story that will keep you on the edge of your seat.”

 

Here is a scene from Saloa (Image is a collaboration btwn my photoshop skills and the AI Dali2). It is based on the prompt:
 
“a sleek futuristic Zepplin flying above a white futuristic city partially hidden in a green lush rainforest from above.”

AI is able to use the same technique to ‘spot patterns’ in any sufficiently large data sets, for example, genomes. Here is a first step in that direction:
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-aging-driven-unbalanced-genes-ai.html

Pretty soon, confronted by a sticky kitchen floor, I’m going to be able to prompt GenomeGen3:

“Clone me a little helper. A friendly miniature mammoth with blue fur, a mop for a trunk, and a domestic hygiene fixation.”

This is what a Singularity feels like!