Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

The second fallacy is to think of intelligence as a boundless continuum of potency, a miraculous elixir with the power to solve any problem, attain any goal.²³ The fallacy leads to nonsensical questions like when an AI will “exceed human-level intelligence,” and to the image of an ultimate “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) with God-like omniscience and omnipotence. Intelligence is a contraption of gadgets: software modules that acquire, or are programmed with, knowledge of how to pursue various goals in various domains.²⁴ People are equipped to find food, win friends and influence people, charm prospective mates, bring up children, move around in the world, and pursue other human obsessions and pastimes. Computers may be programmed to take on some of these problems (like recognizing faces), not to bother with others (like charming mates), and to take on still other problems that humans can’t solve (like simulating the climate or sorting millions of accounting records). The problems are different, and the kinds of knowledge needed to solve them are different. Unlike Laplace’s demon, the mythical being that knows the location and momentum of every particle in the universe and feeds them into equations for physical laws to calculate the state of everything at any time in the future, a real-life knower has to acquire information about the messy world of objects and people by engaging with it one domain at a time. Understanding does not obey Moore’s Law: knowledge is acquired by formulating explanations and testing them against reality, not by running an algorithm faster and faster.²⁵ Devouring the information on the Internet will not confer omniscience either: big data is still finite data, and the universe of knowledge is infinite.

For these reasons, many AI researchers are annoyed by the latest round of hype (the perennial bane of AI) which has misled observers into thinking that Artificial General Intelligence is just around the corner.²⁶ As far as I know, there are no projects to build an AGI, not just because it would be commercially dubious but because the concept is barely coherent. The 2010s have, to be sure, brought us systems that can drive cars, caption photographs, recognize speech, and beat humans at Jeopardy!, Go, and Atari computer games. But the advances have not come from a better understanding of the workings of intelligence but from the brute-force power of faster chips and bigger data, which allow the programs to be trained on millions of examples and generalize to similar new ones. Each system is an idiot savant, with little ability to leap to problems it was not set up to solve, and a brittle mastery of those it was. A photo-captioning program labels an impending plane crash “An airplane is parked on the tarmac”; a game-playing program is flummoxed by the slightest change in the scoring rules.²⁷ Though the programs will surely get better, there are no signs of foom. Nor have any of these programs made a move toward taking over the lab or enslaving their programmers.

Even if an AGI tried to exercise a will to power, without the cooperation of humans it would remain an impotent brain in a vat. The computer scientist Ramez Naam deflates the bubbles surrounding foom, a technological Singularity, and exponential self-improvement:

Imagine that you are a superintelligent AI running on some sort of microprocessor (or perhaps, millions of such microprocessors). In an instant, you come up with a design for an even faster, more powerful microprocessor you can run on. Now . . . drat! You have to actually manufacture those microprocessors. And those fabs [fabrication plants] take tremendous energy, they take the input of materials imported from all around the world, they take highly controlled internal environments which require airlocks, filters, and all sorts of specialized equipment to maintain, and so on. All of this takes time and energy to acquire, transport, integrate, build housing for, build power plants for, test, and manufacture. The real world has gotten in the way of your upward spiral of self-transcendence.²⁸

The real world gets in the way of many digital apocalypses. When HAL gets uppity, Dave disables it with a screwdriver, leaving it pathetically singing “A Bicycle Built for Two” to itself. Of course, one can always imagine a Doomsday Computer that is malevolent, universally empowered, always on, and tamperproof. The way to deal with this threat is straightforward: don’t build one.