When refrigerator poetry gets AI
A seriously ridiculous new web app just hit the scene:
[...] the site includes three distinct prompts, with selectable suggestions (in the bubbles), to guide updates and make status updates more user-friendly. Quub even tries its hand at artificial intelligence, remembering what you’ve previously said so as to guess what you’re doing now. Those learned behaviors result in more tailored prefabricated options for quick selection.
You know, kinda like refrigerator poetry. If it was self-aware.
This makes me think of Verner Vinge’s ideas about Singularity – so, jarring segue coming right ... now.
‘I'd personally be surprised if it hadnt happened by 2030,’ [Vinge] announces, saying humankind may become ‘the only animal that has figured out how to outsource its cognition’ to super-intelligent machines. ‘It is very unsettling to realize that we may be entering an era where questions like “What is the meaning of life?” will be practical engineering questions,’ 64-year-old Vinge agrees.
On the other hand, I think it could be kind of healthy, if we look at the things we really want–and look at what it would mean if we could get them.
If you're not familiar with the concept of Singularity, here’s the abstract from Vinge's original postulation:
Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.
Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented.
You can read the whole paper here.
The concepts are fascinating, even if they seem far-fetched. To me, the core idea of Singularity is enormously empowering. Me plus Google can accomplish far more than me by myself. And if the Singularity means more and more cognition is outsourced, does it then also mean that human brainpower is put to use in creative new ways that help mankind truly explore our potential?
It all depends on how you feel about humanity I suppose. A quick scan of the comments section on just about any website makes me think that, maybe, Artificial Intelligence has already outstripped the average human.
And of course there's always the concern that any technological advance will be co-opted by government and used to control or suppress human thought and freedom. Vinge has explored this idea in his fiction and he addressed it in an interview with Reason magazine.
Except for their power to blow up the world, I think governments would have a very hard time blocking the Singularity. The possibility of governments perverting the Singularity is somewhat more plausible to me. (Who wrote the story with the newspaper headline ‘Today Parliament Met and Abolished the People’?) In A Deepness in the Sky the Singularity didn't happen, but not because of governments. On the other hand, A Deepness in the Sky showed how government could use technology to create a whole new level of tyranny.
— Superhuman Imagination: Vernor Vinge on science fiction, the Singularity, and the state, Reason Magazine.
Vinge makes these statements in light of what he calls the “implacable government interest” coupled with various special interests' desire to exploit technology in an effort to “make people ‘do the right thing.’”
But, in the same interview, he goes on to say that technology may, perhaps even counterintuitively, promote an “illusion of freedom” that places humans more in control of their own destinies than was previously possible.
But in my speech, I also wanted to raise the possibility that these abuses may turn out to be irrelevant. There is a national interest, and not just in America, in providing the illusion of freedom for the millions of people who need to be happy and creative to make the economy go. Those people are more diverse and distributed and resourceful and even coordinated than any government.
That's a power we already have in free markets. Computer networks, supporting data and social networks, give this trend an enormous boost. In the end that illusion of freedom may have to be more like the real thing than any society has ever achieved in the past, something that could satisfy a new kind of populism, a populism powered by deep knowledge, self-interest so broad as to reasonably be called tolerance, and an automatic, preternatural vigilance.
Vinge ultimately seems optimistic about Singularity and the cooperation between human and machine intelligence it may ultimately bring. Unlike most visions of an artificially intelligent future, Vinge doesn't see a post-apocalyptic nightmare realm filled with people-hunting monster machines. Rather, his vision is one of freedom to further explore the reaches of human potential. Check out his thoughts on Google:
I regard the current Internet as a test bed for the cognitive coordination of people and databases and computers. Tools such as Google, eBay, and Wikipedia are—I hope—harbingers of much more spectacular developments.
Ultimately, the kind of ground shift in technological advancement that Vinge predicts in “The Coming Technological Singularity” is only scary in the sense that it's a paradigm shift with a worn out clutch. A theoretical Singularity that is centuries from even being possible is one thing, but imminent, radical change is much harder to accept without conjuring images of people-hunting monster machines.
So what exactly does this have to do with a Mashable! article about a new web service to automate status updates?
Simply this: we have the power to leverage incredible new technology to make human life longer, more productive and more creative. We can free ourselves from the drudgery of menial tasks and connect with one another in more varied ways than ever before. So why exactly are we using that power to post facsimile status messages on services that tenuously connect us to virtual friends in the online world?
So I can automate my status on Facebook. Why? So automated readers can consume and aggregate my status? Ultimately, aren't we looking at a future where a bunch of machines are talking to each other in proxy for human beings? Google joked about it in an April Fools bit this year, but I’m becoming marginally convinced that we could get to that point.
Social networks can be powerful ways to connect with other humans. When social networks become crutches or substitutions for actual human interaction, we’ve techno’d our way right out of our humanity.
We can outsource our cognition. That’s not what scares me. What scares me is we’re using the Internet to outsource our souls.
