On Artificial Intelligence: Part 2
Sometime between three and four hundred thousand years ago mankind learned to make and use fire. Nothing has been the same since.
About thirty thousand years ago someone in Central Eurasia (probably a teenage male) was courageous enough or crazy enough to climb onto the back of a terrified horse. As the steppe-dwelling tribespeople soon discovered, they could ride further in a day than they had walked in a week, and they could take heavy loads with them. Before long these tribes spread, not always peacefully, throughout Europe and the Indian subcontinent, bringing their genes, their culture, and their Indo-European languages with them.
The first crude steam engine appeared in 1606. A century and a half later, James Watt figured out how to allow the steam to escape in a more orderly way and the industrial era was born, with factories, railways, and steamships.
We look back on the Industrial Revolution as a great leap forward for mankind, but for all but the privileged few it was anything but. Small landholders and craftsmen quickly became redundant and were compelled to leave behind the clear air and green fields of their villages for the fetid smoke-filled slums of grimy cities. Social upheaval fed political upheaval which led to savage wars on an industrial scale.
And yet we survived as a species. Survived and thrived, because nearly all of us today are vastly wealthier than our forebears of six or eight generations ago. Unlike our ancestors who died of malnutrition and overwork, we are unhealthy today because we eat too much and exercise too little.
Sometime in the last thirty years or so you acquired a telephone that you could carry around in your pocket or purse. Although you call it your “phone”, it also takes photographs of higher quality than any camera most of us have ever owned, provides detailed maps of the entire world, and gives you instant access to answers to anything from “Hey, Siri, where’s the nearest Indian restaurant?” to “Hey, Google, who invented the gyroscope?” Oh, yeah, and you can order a meal and buy a walking stick in a remote Italian village with real time translation. And about a hundred other things.
Remember landlines? Movie stores? Typewriters and carburettors? Monochrome computer screens? Computers without screens? Film cameras? Newspapers? Record players? Eight track players? Floppy disks? Cash?
Nobody can say with any precision where artificial intelligence is going to go, and how it’s going to transform our world. Nobody had any clear idea, either, when the first horse was tamed, the steam engine invented, the first airplane flown, or the first coffee bean roasted.
But we do know a few things. First is that as we figured out how to get our heads and hands around these things, and then we put them to our use. Second, the transition wasn’t always pretty. Third, in the end, they were mostly beneficial.
And if you don’t agree, you can just ask AI.