AI Singularity Will Come in Stages

I've been fretting about the coming AI revolution for a decade now. It started when I realized that the biggest threat to the human body was going to be not climate change or political turmoil but the persistent human weakness for tech wizardry. In 2014 there were only 6 people in the world paid full-time to try to prevent AI from wiping out humans (according to AI researcher Nick Bostrom). That year I did my TED talk on The Erotic Crisis about my fears. But then finally journalists started asking what I thought were the right questions; not "will AI kill us?" but "what effect AI will have on human flourishing?" So I felt I could stop obsessing about it and return to artmaking. 

Self portrait in my AI-generated studio

Now we're faced with the game-changing appearance of AI generators, which "create" brand new text or images from human prompts. The results are eerie and downright frightening (as when Bing's Sydney insists that Kevin Roose loved it instead of his wife!) Will humans be obsolete now? Not yet, but it is looking more dire for us every day. (That's why I signed the recent open letter to pause AI development, by The Future of Life Institute.)

I've thought for years that there will not be one Singularity (when AI surpasses human capacities in all cognitive areas), but four consecutive ones, each more alarming and damaging than the last. This not only increases the threat but makes it more difficult to place. The singularity will not so much be a sudden uprising by the machine, but a gradual loss of control by humans (think of the economy suddenly failing for no apparent reason).

The final singularity will be the objective one, when AI actually does overtake humans. I contend that no one will really know when that is because it will make little practical difference. Because that will be proceeded by three others that will mark the end of human dominance on earth.

The first Singularity will be Economic, the point where AI so disrupts employment that vast sectors of the population are made obsolete, as the jobs that have supported us forever are replaced with AI programs that can do the same work, without breaks or any requirements other than power, for pennies.

The second one will be Relational, when humans will no longer be able to tell when they are dealing with a machine or a person. This is already happening in customer service and other such applications where it really doesn't matter much whether the voice on the other end is human as long as your problem is solved. But where the relation is most important–– such as between a political representative and her constituents, or AI posing as intimates–– this will be catastrophic.

The third will be a Political one, when a certain large portion of the population reacts against the strangeness of a newly unfathomable world where humans have lost control. They will blame whomever they hate most (immigrants, Democrats, techies) and, fueled by social media wildfires, launch a war against the perceived perpetrators, regardless of facts.

And of course the final singularity is Loss of human agency, but by that point it will forever be unknowable, which hardly matters. Once civilization is controlled by an invisible hand, humans will simply not matter. “The AI does not love you, nor does it hate you. You are made of atoms it can use for something else," says Eliezer Yudkowsky, quite chillingly.

AI is being developed without controls by competitors for an unbelievably huge prize, a recipe for certain destruction. Even if all parties know it's a race to doom, every one of them will rather be first than see the other guy win. This is fixed human nature, I'm afraid. Since the capitalist market is now our god, greed will be our downfall. In such an environment, AI will steadily grow in capacity while humans will only defend those places where we can see our own weakness. AI will overtake humans not in areas we imagine, but the places we never thought of, since it will operate in ways that never occurred to us! It won't be until after the takeover, if ever, that humans will finally see where our weaknesses actually lie. More likely, we'll never know how we lost that battle. That's of course too late.

I don't see any remedy, other than a full stop, which Yudkowsky recommends. More skepticism and more regulation placed on AI will help slow the crisis. But like Narcissus, we might just die transfixed with the image we see in our reflection. 

I hope we can all apply our humanity to this problem. We need us all. In the meantime, take great refuge in your relationships. Human relationships are what make life worth living. Store up your treasure there!