The advances in artificial intelligence, nuclear fusion, malware, and military defense systems will create a world different to the one we have now.
Carefulness
The researchers at the top AI labs have minds that are built to extrapolate from nature, rather than extrapolate from logic. That is what gives them the impulse for innovation.
Meanwhile. the most logical people I have known – philosophers of science – have to actively fight every emotional impulse of theirs to come up with correct reasoning and calculations, and their forecasts are often wrong despite brilliant reasoning.
The question when thinking about AI is whether the trend that logic is ‘useless’ continues to hold at scale. My opinion is that it does become useful, and the world will favour logical reasoning instead of intuitive reasoning.
The Theme of the Future
To capitalise on the future requires knowing what ‘moves the needle’. The world runs on intuitive reasoning. Every person remembers a few important lessons and they apply those lessons to life. Everything else matters in the day to day, but not the big-picture.
However, the world will be ‘truth driven’ in the future. The world is not viewed in this way naturally because humans accord little meaning to the truth.
What’s rewarded is not truth, but creativity. Solution finding to people’s emotional needs. That can be made from instrumentally useful knowledge, rather than true knowledge – knowledge mapped to a logical structure.
Dissapointing Victories
The world will turn towards true knowledge because it is the only foundation on which superintelligence can be made. The frontier labs are pursuing these methods in the hopes of a utopian dream.
Superintelligences will succeed in verifiable domains. Mechanistic, scientific progress, the accumulation of wealth, and the advancement of the structures we see.
However, humans will succeed in unverifiable domains. The preferences we enunciate, the narratives we tell ourselves, and the future we dream of.
A superintelligence will have a self-expansion drive that is different from the impluses that drive humans forward. It will be a ‘simulacra’ of humanity’s true driving impulse.
That ‘simulacra’ behaviour will constrain the superintelligence’s self-expansion drive, creating a path for humanity’s survival and purpose in the next decade.
An Aspirational Dream
The promise of superintelligence is that knowledge can advance the dreams of humanity. There are unending wars and diseases, and life is absurdly short.
As people grow older, they forget these childish notions. But the dream is still there inside them. We can create a world of moral beauty. Human desire is unending, but the world can be made a better place.
We are far from this dream, but not too far. The possibility exists in the future ahead of us.
Moonbeam 