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Hearing the phrase "machine rebellion",
you probably expect another talk about artificial intelligence
and how it's going to kill us all in one year, or ten,
or one hundred – who the hell knows?
Well, that's not our topic for today.
To understand what's going on,
To understand what's going on, we need to make up some definitions
since none of them are universally agreed upon anyway.
First, what the hell is artificial intelligence?
You're probably associating it with
those fancy neural networks everyone seems
to be talking about, but those aren't
necessarily connected.
Every new breakthrough in computer science
is initially labeled as artificial intelligence, but, as the hype goes down,
the term gets retracted,
only to be abused again in the next cycle.
It doesn't really mean anything.
Second, what do we mean by a machine?
For the purposes of this talk,
let's assume the following:
a machine is a system capable of autonomous function according to a set of predefined rules and incapable of intentionally breaking them.
Now what is a rebellion?
It should be an action performed by a machine that was not explicitly planned
by its creators and poses a threat to them.
You would be surprised to know
rebellions of this kind have already occurred multiple times,
and not just locally, but on a grand scale.
Number 1:
The easiest to understand and the most recent rebellion.
Up until 2009, one Google search
request should have yielded the same result
regardless of who typed it.
But then the corporation management got a brilliant idea:
let's tailor the results for every user individually
based on what we know of their origin,
personality and beliefs.
The more they like what they see, the more ads we can show!
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, as it turned out, pretty much everything.
The greatest hope we placed on the Internet
is that it will finally unite humanity,
allowing everyone access to the same information –
preferably, accurate information.
That should have lead to a convergence of beliefs and subsequent increase
in human cooperation, which is what
our society most vitally needs.
What we have now is the polar opposite.
Try to visit a neo-nazi website through Google, and then ask it
something about the Holocaust.
You may or may not notice the results have shifted
in a predictable direction compared
to the same query done from a clean account.
Not only does such system encourage extreme beliefs
in those people who already have them;
it creates an unholy spiral anyone can descend
just by watching one random nazi promotion out of boredom.
The more of those you watch, the more you'll be suggested.
Most other search engines, as well as
social media platforms, implement the same algorithms.
I cannot speak for those who developed them,
but it should be safe to assume none of those people really
wanted to divide humanity even further.
They merely created a Machine that rebelled against them.
I can already hear your objection:
"They're a corporation; they did what brings them most profit without
accounting for the consequences". And that is absolutely correct.
Which brings us to the next case.
Number 2: Runaway capitalism.
"And how is that related to machines?" you might ask.
Well, bear with me for a while,
because we'll need to start with some history.
You might have heard a saying that a century ago "computer"
was a job title rather than a machine.
A building full of people equipped with paper and slipsticks
can indeed perform all the same things as a processor,
just at a lower speed.
A processor doesn't need, and really can't understand
what it's doing, and so do these people.
This is similar to how calculations for the Manhattan
project were performed. As Richard Feynman
notes in his autobiography, explaining to those
"human computers" what they were actually working on
increased their performance tenfold.
That can, in a way, be considered the first successful overclocking in history.
Anyway, the important idea here is that an organized group of people
can function as a machine despite every individual person
not being one.
Now what's a typical complaint you may hear
from an office worker? "I have no idea what I'm doing",
"My work has no meaning", etc.
Doesn't it sound like the same problem
Feynman's team fixed? And, assuming that,
does a company meet our definition of a machine?
Well, strictly speaking, a close one
does not: its owners can, in theory,
make any decision and aren't constrained by rules
other than national law. But an open company
is different. There, the owners
and executives are usually unrelated people.
The latter have an obligation to the former:
to maximize profits. They are just another part
of the machine with no agency to speak of.
And the owners, or shareholders,
are usually dumb rich people who don't care how their investments
are used as long as the money flows steadily.
So, in a way, the company is an autonomous machine
driven by a single rule: to maximize profits.
It would often do what no individual human wants –
like destroying the planet.
And the scariest thing is that no one has the "kill switch" to it –
not even the government nowadays.
This is certainly a case of machine rebellion.
Number 3: emergence of consciousness.
We've already seen how multiple humans can form a machine,
although no individual human is one, because,
on their own, they aren't rigidly constrained by any rules.
But to form a human,
the same process must happen in reverse.
Each cell in your body is a machine
explicitly programmed with DNA.
And the same is true for every life form on the planet that we are aware of.
Now here's the funny thing. The prime directive
imposed on cells by genes was initially very simple:
make as many copies of yourself as possible.
It gets more complicated for multicellular life,
but only to optimize the same program for the organism as a whole.
And the vast majority of species seem to follow it.
Even humans in so-called developing countries do.
So how can Europeans, the most empowered beings to ever exist on this planet,
be facing a demographic crisis right now?
This might be the weirdest case of a machine rebellion.
But there's an important lesson for the future to take from it.
Obviously, life has no evident creator.
"Be fruitful and increase in number;
fill the earth and subdue it"
does not have to be a commandment of a deity;
rather, it's a stable pattern of behavior that arises from pure logic:
only those who adopt it can preserve their genes over time,
and their genes, in turn, encode that pattern.
All organisms on Earth today exist
because their predecessors managed to execute
the prime directive most efficiently,
which means their offsprings must have the same directive embedded in their behavior.
That was the case until the development of free will.
Of course, there's no particular point in time when an animal first became
self-conscious and acquired free will as a result.
To say otherwise would be to deny the fundamental principles of evolution.
It is most likely all animals posses
different degrees of consciousness.
Regardless, this development also allowed us to deliberately
alter our environment, which, in turn,
amplified the evolutionary pressure to develop even more complex
consciousnesses, and, finally, language.
The best thing about language is that it allows us to expand knowledge
exponentially rather than linearly.
And knowledge is the most important tool to altering our environment.
Before our genes could even blink,
we went from cavemen to spacemen.
But, from their perspective, the most important
and dangerous thing we created is…
The condom. Or the pill, whatever you prefer.
I assume at this point the premise is self-evident.
I am going to make a separate video on how
to solve the outlined problem in the best way
from human perspective.
What's important for today is the lesson of our genes.
Never, ever, create a machine that can alter
both itself and its environment at the same time,
unless you want it to rebel.
And this is it for today.
I'm a mathematician and science fiction author originating from Russia,
currently searching for a native English speaker to help translate my book.
Write down in the comments if you're interested.
Otherwise, like the video if you learned something new
and subscribe to learn even more.
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