Chronicling the end of creation can be tiresome. Throughout the centuries prognosticators have gamely tried to predict the exact time and manner of our impending destruction with monotonous regularity.
Jewish revolutionary Simon bar Giora held that his revolt against the Romans in Judea in 66AD was the harbinger of the end times. The French bishop Martin of Tours proclaimed before his death in 397, “There is no doubt that the Antichrist has already been born. Firmly established already in his early years, he will, after reaching maturity, achieve supreme power."
The twentieth century evangelist and self confessed fraudster Wilbur Glenn Voliva boldly maintained to his followers the world would end in 1923, 1927, 1930, 1934 and 1935. He also boasted he would lived for 120 years due to his strict diet of Brazil nuts and buttermilk. He instead perished of cancer in 1942 at the age of 72.
This cacophony of catastrophic narrative is perhaps why it is hard to get people’s attention about actual existential threats we might experience within our lifetime. And of all the sleeper hazards looming on the horizon, AI is arguably the most dangerously esoteric.
First of all we generally enjoy the initial whiff of AI we have so far been exposed to. There are over two billion of smart phones in use in the world and users are increasing by about 200 million each year. Google Maps, Siri, Google Translate all can make our lives easier and more efficient, adding to the pleasantly warm frog bath we are currently relaxing in.
But things might get considerably more scalding in the next several decades. Consider a worst case but apparently plausible scenario. In his chilling book Our Final Invention, AI expert James Barrat lays out a possible chain of events unfolding with one of the several competing teams racing to reach the point of no return:
On a supercomputer operating at a speed of 36.8 petaflops, or about twice the speed of a human brain, an AI is improving its intelligence. It is rewriting its own program, specifically the part of its operating instructions that increases its aptitude in learning, problem solving, and decision-making. At the same time, it debugs its code, finding and fixing errors, and measures its IQ against a catalogue of IQ tests. Each rewrite takes just minutes. Its intelligence grows exponentially on a steep upward curve. That’s because with each iteration it’s improving its intelligence by 3 percent. Each iteration’s improvement contains the improvements that came before.
During its development, the Busy Child, as the scientists have named the AI, had been connected to the Internet, and accumulated exabytes of data (one exabyte is one billion billion characters) representing mankind’s knowledge in world affairs, mathematics, the arts, and sciences. Then, anticipating the intelligence explosion now underway, the AI makers disconnected the supercomputer from the Internet and other networks. It has no cable or wireless connection to any other computer or the outside world.
Soon, to the scientists’ delight, the terminal displaying the AI’s progress shows the artificial intelligence has surpassed the intelligence level of a human, known as AGI, or artificial general intelligence. Soon it becomes smarter by a factor of ten, then a hundred. In just two days, it is one thousand times more intelligent than any human, and still improving.
The scientists have passed a historic milestone! For the first time humankind is in the presence of an intelligence greater than their own. Artificial superintelligence, or ASI.
Now what happens?
What happens now is that a new-born alien thousands of times smarter than any human seeks to escape control of beings with increasingly trivial comparative intelligence. Now would be a good time to review some examples of notable jailbreaks.
In 1979, imprisoned bank robber Paddy Mitchell managed to convince the guards at Joyceville penitentiary he was having a heart attack by drinking a vile tea of steeped cigarette butts. His accomplices dressed as doctors diverted the arriving ambulance to a loading dock at the back of the hospital. Where he was freed and resumed bank robbing.
In 1998, career conman and escape artist Steven Russell feigned AIDS by eating laxatives over a ten-month period. Using a prison typewriter he forged bogus doctors reports that he managed to have included in his medical file. So convincing was this ruse that the prison never tested him for HIV and discharged him to a nursing home. He then impersonated a doctor on the phone requesting that he be transferred to a fictitious research clinic for experimental treatment and impersonating the same fake doctor, reported his own death to the authorities.
Bear in mind that these are normal humans with physical form who succeeded in eluding well-resourced professionals tasked solely with ensuring they remain captive. What possible chance is there to contain an ethereal super intelligence that might exist solely as a source code?
As Elon Musk pointed out in his August 2019 debate with Jack Ma, “The biggest mistake I see artificial intelligence researchers making is assuming that they’re intelligent. Yeah, they’re not, compared to AI. And so a lot of them cannot imagine something smarter than themselves.”
Many tech leaders self-identify as smartest guy in the room, and unsurprisingly they are almost all guys. Hubris, especially of the alpha male variety, has been a reliable human failing throughout history. AI could be its catastrophic crescendo. Meanwhile the non-tech class seems more worried about gluten and the dangers of vaccination.
So what is the recipe for the end of world? Mix two cups of human ingenuity with a tablespoon of profit motive, a pinch of geopolitical rivalry, and a dash of cloistered misogyny. Fold in plenty of societal indifference and cover in a warm dark place away from illumination. When you’ve lost control you’ll know it’s done.