Finally (after many delays!) we come to the final entry in my series of comments about quotes from a Forbes article by Rob Toews. It’s a great one to end on, I believe:
“Artificial intelligence is one of the most profound things we're working on as humanity. It is more profound than fire or electricity.”
Those words come from Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet Inc., and its subsidiary Google LLC.
In considering this quote, we have to think about the nature of fire and electricity, and how profound they really are for humanity, First of all, I assume that Mr Pichai is talking about the discovery of how to use fire and electricity, not just their existence. Even discovery doesn’t quite work, as both fire and electricity have always existed. What Mr Pichai must mean is the harnessing of these natural phenomena. AI is different from these two things because (hint’s in the name) it is entirely humanmade, rather than being a natural phenomenon that man must learn to harness.
Artificial can mean two different things in English: one is in the sense of artificial light. Light from a lamp is just light, but it is artificial in that a human made the lamp. In contrast, natural light comes from the sun, which isn’t humanmade.
The other meaning is in the sense of artificial flowers. Even the most beautiful of these are not flowers, but humanmade imitations of flowers.
One can argue that all fire and electricity are natural. Humanmade devices may initiate them, but they certainly aren’t imitations. AI isn’t the same. I’d argue that it is all as artificial as flowers made of plastic or silk.
In considering the quote in this light, it’s probably easier to start by talking about how man learned to harness electricity and consider fire later. Humanity observed and played with static electricity since at least 600BC. Creating batteries and circuits of flowing electricity descends from the late 18th century, and practical use (first to provide light in people’s homes) followed in the 19th century. Maxwell created the mathematics that describes the intrinsic physical link between electricity and magnetism in 1865, which paved the way for Einstein’s theory of relativity in the first few years of the 20th century. The rest, as they say, is history, and the entirety of modern physics and technology rests primarily on humanity understanding and harnessing electricity.
However, at its roots, the profundity of the impacts of electricity on humanity rests on a straightforward thing. Clarke and Kubrick graphically illustrate what this thing is in the early scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
For those who haven’t seen it, the film opens with ape-like protohumans struggling to survive when a giant black monolith appears, which they marvel at and touch. Soon after, one of the hominids who touched the strange object slays a beast using a bone as a bludgeon. In celebration, the creature throws the bone into the air. As it turns in slow motion it cinematically dissolves into a spacecraft. The monolith prompted one crucial change, the discovery of action at a distance, and that change took the hominids from the discovery of tools to interplanetary space flight.
The profundity of electricity is action at a distance. Mechanical, hydraulic, and steam devices were already on the way to where electricity eventually took us with action at a distance. It’s just that because of physics, electricity (and the electromagnetic waves Maxwell described) do action at a distance really well. With them, we can send power and signals over long distances, at nearly the fastest speed possible. Pretty profound.
But not as profound, I think, as fire. Like electricity, fire has always existed. People probably learned how to make it as soon as they saw the powerful things it could do. But it’s profound effect is that once humanity was able to use it in one of the most simple ways possible, it changed what humanity was. That use of fire is cooking.
For every creature on Earth, there’s a balance sheet for food. There’s an energy cost of obtaining it, and digesting it, and thus that food better contain enough energy to overcome those costs and leave of bit more for things like reproduction, or a species is doomed.
That is unless you can use fire. Fire allowed humanity to exploit external energy sources to breakdown all sorts of things into digestible food. This made food easier to obtain, and less costly (in terms of energy) to digest. The resulting energy surplus could be used for all sorts of things, like making brains bigger and more creative, so recipes got better.
Like the action-at-a-distance transition from bone axes to spacecraft, history followed on from fire. Humanity’s creation of cuisine led to our using excess energy for all sorts of creations, not just for survival, but for enrichment and pleasure. Burning things to make our lives easier hasn’t had entirely positive consequences, but fire certainly changed us from a creature who just managed to survive, to animals that manage to create.
So the question is, is AI more profound than electricity and fire?
AI certainly creates a new kind of action-at-a-distance. It means that the way we represent the world, and the way we calculate about it can translate into decisions that we can’t fully foresee, through systems that we can’t fully comprehend, and whose actions we can’t fully anticipate.
Will AI change what we are, the way that food allowed us to fuel bigger brains, and create new ways of interacting with the world? In reality, that has been going on since we developed artefacts of all kinds. But the computational devices we now carry with us, which extend the actions of the assumptions of their creators to distances that reach everyone, are clearly changing the way we see and react to our world, and each other. That is profound. And dangerous.
This is the reason that it is so important to realise what the word “artificial” means in artificial intelligence. It is not like artificial light: that is to say, real, human-like intelligence, just disembodied and made by man. Instead, it is like artificial flowers: an imitation, that looks a bit like the real thing but contains none of its complexity and substance.
AI is changing who we are, that’s inevitable. But as we change we should realise that we bring innate capabilities to decision making that have been evolving since someone first lit up a fire to cook a beast they’d slaughtered with a bone axe. Our large brains are the most complex thing in the universe, and the product of millions of years of adapting to a complex, uncertain world, that doesn’t yield easily to mere computation. Our ability to use electricity to compute at near light speed will enhance us, but it will not replace us. We all need to understand that to cope with the profound changes AI is causing today.