HUMAN FUTURES - MARCH 2022

FUTURE MATTERS

THE FUTURE OF LIFE AND AI FOR HUMANS

By Claire A. Nelson

WITH the specter of World War 3 being talked about in hushhush conversations and dire warnings being sounded about the monstrous idea of giving artificial intelligence (AI) control over nuclear weapons just in case they lose their bearings and trigger an apocalyptic conflict in the likeness of Armageddon, I decided to make an effort to get a deeper understanding on this thing called AI, and more importantly its impending progeny Artificial Generalized Intelligence (AGI). To date, much of my attention has been on the debates around AI and the Future of Work. You know the headline stories that scream out, ‘The Bots are Coming, The Bots are Coming’ and urge that both people planners and policy makers, take note of the fact that the workforce of the future will need to face off against robots. At best, they say, the future will belong to those who can successfully ‘cobot’ -that is to say- cohabitate or co-work, co-manage humans alongside and with robots. One of the critiques I make of headlines like these on the future of AI is that they are so dominated by western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) country mindset, that the points of view from and the realities of the low and middle-income developing countries (the planners and policymakers in the humble countries) are not taken to account in designing the global governance architecture. For countries in the global South with burgeoning youth populations, high unemployment and low levels of industrial development, the idea of robots taking jobs that don’t even as yet exist, this ‘botbaiting’ reality, may not be in the cards for their foreseen future. The rules by which they play the AI field may take on a whole different standard.

When I think about the future of AI, and the future of work, it may not be desirable to skip over the slow road transition to more employment, or high-level employment as an AI-enabled industrial revolution would be accompanied by such huge social dislocations, that any productivity gains would quite likely be erased by violent social unrest. The metrics that matter for good governance must balance GDP against the social goals of employment and inclusion and help keep the peace through dampening social disruptions that trample social cohesion. In this regard, bearing in mind the knowledge that AI and its denizens march inexorably on, I believe it to be a responsibility of my duty of care for the future generations, to look closely at this thing called ‘AI’ and help to amplify the conversation on how we might move humanity forward, in the presence of AI or with the support of AI. The question becomes then, ‘How might we pace this seemingly inevitable shift to AI, and manage the decision-making processes enforced by the global economic and financial elite, such as to reduce the pressures on developing countries to comply with blueprints for the future that do not make sense for the overall wellbeing of 99 percent of their people?’. This is the question that drove me to take up a seat in the court of public opinion on the role of AI and the future of life. As well as more recently, to jump into a global competition on world-building a plausible and pleasant reality for life in an AGI world circa 2045, being fomented by the crew of the Future of Life Institute, founded by Max Tegmark, the author of the best-selling book

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Life 3.0. The main challenge is to build a plausible pleasant world in which we would want to live in a world powered by AGI and explain how this AGI makes this pleasant world possible.

The first thing that struck me about this challenge is the choice of the year 2040 as the date of arrival of AGI. Do they know something we don’t know? Ever since the seemingly-prescient Ray Kurzweil placed a mid-century date on the arrival of the human/AI singularity, and as far back as 2014, the Musk-Gates-Hawkins triumvirate gave off furious funk on the need to place brakes on the AGI steamroller, and to make sure the safety bags are properly designed and tested before letting AGI out on the public throughfare I have been fluctuating between making like an ostrich in the sand and or prosing like a parrot on a perch on this matter of AI and our shared future. But with an expert like Max Tegmark, laying down the presumption of 2040 arrival of the dawn of AGI, I wonder if this seeming eventuality may have been accelerated by the COVID induced metaverse. Who would have ‘thunk’ that Snoop Dogg’s entry into the digital economy would have brought on such as a buying frenzy that caused someone to pay $450,000 in Ethereum to be his neighbor in the metaverse? More recently, Caribbean Queen Rihanna jumped on board filing for trademark FENTY estate in the Metaverse with downloadable and non-downloadable virtual goods, such as computer games, entertainment services, featuring cosmetics and makeup, cosmetic and makeup accessories, hair care stuff, skin care stuff, for use in online virtual worlds alongside mobile applications, digital collectibles, digital tokens, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and digital art. Shades of The Matrix!

Then came my stumble-upon the disturbingly realistic conversations between two GPT-3 AIs discussing their feelings and their fears which really got me buzzing. GPT-3 which means Generative Pre-trained Transformer is a neural network machine learner created by Open AI, a research business co-founded by Elon Musk. It has been described as the most important and useful advance in AI, being the largest artificial neural network ever created, up to 2021. The straw that broke my camel-back resolve and got my head out of the sand for good, came with the recent announcement that Malta had conferred digital citizenship on a machine learning app made to educate tourists about Malta. This gave rise to such ire that as I write, I find myself wishing for a group of real Maltese citizens to rise to reengineer this trojan horse and rubbish this assault on the meaning of citizenship, a right that many have fought and died for.

So now I am taking a deep dive into the future of AI, and I am more convinced than ever that we need to ramp up AI literacy for all, especially elected official and those that advise

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them, quickly and in a hurry. Humans for AI, it is time to suit up. The battle lines for human futures are being drawn and it is critical that more humans find and join the field. I confess that when the founding board members of ‘Humans for AI’, a global NGO, asked me to serve as an Advisory Board member some years ago, I was not as scared then, as I am now. Today, now that I have had the opportunity to read many more books, participate in several dialogues and conversations including a UNESCO Committee Conference conversation on AI and its implications for governance, I truly recognize the need for more of us to participate in the conversations about AI to ensure the emergence of beneficial AI for Humans.

These conversations should not just be among the talking heads who truly understand the mathematical and statistical principles of the algorithms of the machine learners that are the precursors to AI. I am convinced that conversations about the future of AI should also be taking place among the rest of us AI illiterates and semi-literates, especially those who seem to think that the day of AGI is too far away to be of relevance to our table topics now. Now is the time to suit up. Get up! Stand up! The rule books for the games are being contemplated now. The algorithms are being developed now. The search for the master algorithm that can link the five main schools of machine learners is on now. And it would seem, he or she or they that find the missing logic will have the holy grail of learners and thus the key to AGI. But will it be beneficial to humans. That is the question.

I want to hope that the gift of the COVID-induced metaverse includes the opportunity to revisit our assumptions about the future we want and the future of humanity. I want to believe that the friends we have made with our brothers and sisters in the matrix has made it possible for new partnerships to be found between and among the haves and the have nots. I want to trust that perhaps the time is right for the birth of a digital nation of earth citizens that would come together to seed a global conversation on how we share our future. Our thriving demands we have a full understanding of the implications for human life and what we value as a species. We need to slow down this rush to what I call the zaftig futures induced by an overdose of technophilia and the siren call towards transhumanism and consider a pivot to a zoetic futures, where life itself and the well-being of humans as part of nature, is the guiding paradigm for the evolution of homo sapiens and human civilization. As the race to study and define consciousness speeds up, we ought to let go of our attachment to the view of reality as mechanic systems and the brain as biological machine and spend more time contemplating the lessons of quantum physics and the notion that entanglement means that consciousness is beyond the brain.

The question is, how do we amplify this conversation? How do we use this opportunity of the transition of the world with Covid, and the reopening of society, cautious as it is, with its three steps forward, two step backwards dance taking place around the world as countries open and close seemingly at will? Might we take this opportunity of global shift as a gift for us to look at all the possible invocations of the future we share. Maybe it is time to get off this treadmill of economic growth at all costs and look at alternative metrics that value life first like Gross National Happiness or National Wellbeing such that any AGI master algorithm would come to understand the true meaning of life. To the extent that COVID has created a prolonged enforced period of introspection, I hope we understand by now that what we most want is a future in which we can breathe, shop, travel, visit, live -- freely.

As to the future of life competition, of course I want my team to win THE prize. But I must admit to feeling a bit giddy just to know I have entered the race to help ensure a future in which provable beneficial AGI could emerge. For I am helping to give birth to an ecosystem where zoetic visions for our shared future will become more normative and help to usher in the kind of AI which taps into the better angels of our nature and broadens the dialogue around how we share our future, and how we might co-create AI in the service of Humans.

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