Three Speculations on the Very Near Future of AI
Let’s think big about AI for a moment, not in terms of business plans and specific applications, but as a civilization-altering technology that’s going to continue blowing our minds in ways that are difficult–but not impossible–to imagine.
Why has artificial intelligence emerged on earth at this particular historical moment, and what are we humans really supposed to do with it? It’s as good a time as any to take an imaginative leap into how artificial intelligence might evolve, on as large a mental canvas as possible. In that spirit, then, here are three speculations about the very near future of artificial intelligence.
1. AI is here to confront and solve climate change
Anthropogenic climate change caused by our unrelenting appetite for fossil fuels threatens the end of civilization as we know it, and mountains of evidence warn us that we’ve triggered the planet’s sixth mass extinction. We seem to react to mounting proof of our climate catastrophe according to the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross model of coping with grief — zig-zagging through stages that include denial, anger, bargaining, and acceptance. The scientific community agrees that the heat waves, pandemics, wildfires, hurricanes, mass dislocations of human populations, food and water shortages, and civil unrest will continue to intensify, marked by milestone events like the collapse of the Thwaites ice sheet and subsequent sea level rise.
Now for the good news. When you have to deal with an exponentially expanding problem, look around for an exponentially expanding solution. It’s time to consider technology as the earth’s natural response to our climate crisis, with artificial intelligence serving as a key mechanism for orchestrating a global response to ensure that our planet continues its job of extending consciousness throughout the universe. Artificial intelligence integrated with the earth’s remote sensing technologies, robotics, biotechnology, and fabrication technologies and distribution, will provide a path to saving human civilization, erasing our silly, arbitrary, and misguided distinctions between “natural” and “artificial” along the way.
The deep integration of AI with what we like to call “the natural world” has already begun. Projects to collect and visualize wildlife data by technologists like Gautham Shah suggest a growing capacity to connect and protect the natural world in the metaverse. The research of Dr. Andrew Adamatzky into the electrical pulses that travel through fungal mycelial networks point to advances in monitoring technologies that will give us ever more granular, digitally facilitated insights into the health and behavior of the planet’s flora. These are just two examples of the ways that scientists are using digital technologies in the field. As these technologies continue to advance, they will continue feeding data to the cloud, data that AI can then facilitate positive feedback loops that convert digital activities into real-world climate solutions. One particularly important watershed moment for the use of AI as part of climate management strategy will come when quantum computing merges with artificial intelligence, allowing it to accelerate at an even more astonishing rate.
2. AI will spark a new era of moral and ethical innovation
While the history of human civilization is far more complicated than we like to acknowledge, it’s generally agreed that the agricultural and industrial revolutions allowed human communities to specialize in certain occupations like engineering, teaching, artisanal pursuits, and the arts. If AI is now threatening to supplant many of the human intellectual activities that until yesterday we considered too “human” to ever be replaced — like designing pharmaceuticals and writing poetry — we might start speculating about the sorts of pursuits we’ll soon find ourselves liberated to enjoy.
Perhaps when freed of the procedural kinds of work we do in spreadsheets, presentations, and documents, our innovations will become more ethical, moral, and artistic in nature. Maybe we’ll suddenly reverse the erosion of humanities in education, as global machine intelligence grows to master science, technology, and engineering. Freed from bureaucratic drudgery, we’ll refocus our attention on timeless questions and creative expression. The human race that persists twenty years from now, while no doubt traumatized by climate catastrophes we must now begin to imagine, will perhaps better understand our place in the universe and do a better job of practicing loving kindness toward all beings.
3. An increase in retrocausality signals the Singularity
The rate of change, particularly technological change, is accelerating. Raymond Kurzweil took note of the exponential growth of storage capacity, processing power, and their equally exponential drop in cost and predicted what he termed the Singularity — the point when humans transcend biology. Since his book The Singularity Is Near came out in 2005, his predictions have been remarkably on-point. Particularly his predictions regarding artificial intelligence.
Kurzweil’s graphs that illustrate the pace of technological evolution often appear in the shape of hockey sticks, with a gradual rise followed by a sudden swing upward. This shift marks the period when technology advances arrive so quickly as to seem practically simultaneous, which Kurzweil believes will happen around the year 2040. As humans, we’re equipped to perceive change at a gradual pace, but we struggle to even conceive of exponential change. By the time we reach this inflection point and the rate of change outstrips the human brain’s capacity to perceive it, we may start to experience more and more instances of retrocausality, a phenomenon in which events in the future appear to flow backward in time to shape the past.
This may sound like science fiction, but scientists like Julia Mossbridge have been researching such phenomena as retrocausality and precognition, gaining more mainstream attention for their views. Most people either have experienced or know people who’ve experienced precognition, as benign as having a hunch about the next song that’s going to play on the radio or as profound as detailed premonitions. Could this be the result of future technologies operating within some kind of field of trans-historical human consciousness? Could recent congressional testimony on and sudden mainstreaming of the UAP phenomenon point to incursions of future technologies into our present?
It’s easy to get sucked into a rabbit hole with this stuff and start to sound a bit bonkers. But recall the world you lived in twenty, even ten years ago. The advances we’ve seen in generative AI this year would have struck us as speculative fiction if we’d had a preview of it back in 2013 or 2003. Now flip the script and understand that the technological advances of 2033 and 2043 will strike today’s version of you as even more stunning, magical, and mind-bending. The great news is that if you’re lucky you won’t just get to witness what’s to come — you get to help make it all happen.
