AI Is Completely Insane Stuff and It Is Oh So Close to Happening (Experts Are Freaking Out For A Reason)

So how 'bout that AI, huh?

It's on the horizon and everyone who's paying attention knows that the greatest minds and most powerful people of our generation are anxiously both simultaneous awaiting, racing towards, and trying to shape the arrival of it.

A short refresher before we dive in.

AI is split into two groups. The first is Artificial Narrow Intelligence. This AI is really, really good at performing tasks that include a narrow function - for example a video game that knows how to make enemies react or (a much more advanced example) an algorithm that manages traffic on a large network or is better than all human players at chess and Go. A.N.I is super good at these narrow tasks, usually performing near or far above human capabilities.

Then there's Artificial General Intelligence. I believe AI researchers refer to it as 'dat good shit'. Seriously, this is the stuff that is going to really transform the world, and is going to do it in ways that are utterly beyond our comprehension. A.G.I is basically AI that can do any task a human can do. This includes things like carry on a conversation, show empathy, seem emotional. In other words these AI will at the very least seem human (whether or not they are will be the debate of the century).

I should make it clear that there isn't a distinct line between the two. Right now the world's best publicly available chatbots are laughably inadequate when it comes to communication (I believe Mitsuku is still the reigning champ - give her a shot, she's pretty damn good. Still a far cry from human, though). The line between A.N.I. and A.G.I. is hasn't quite become indistinct, yet. Right now AI researchers are still working on getting computers to fully and naturally understand speech and language. Once this is mostly done, the advances in AI communicating back will happen at double the speed. Natural language understanding can already be seen in your phone and on your computer when you give your device an order to do a task and it does it. It's responses are pretty canned and unconvincing at the moment, but that'll begin to change in the next five years or so.

But as they become more human we start to reach some pretty sharp ethical and moral concerns. At what point of cognizance do we decide that owning your device is like keeping a slave? At what point do these devices begin to have rights? It's a big question.

Then we've got Elon Musk and his company, Neuralink.

They're planning on creating technology that can merge the human brain with technology to make human brains faster and better so that we have less to fear from AI. Tim Urban wrote a great article on it here.

So what's the point of all of this?

Well, the point is that this could happen at any moment from this point going forward. The chances that A.G.I will show up on the scene will be increasing exponentially from year to year. Right now the odds are pretty low. But those odds will rapidly increase as we begin to enter the 2020's and especially as we pass the mid 2020's.

Every day I scour the science news sites and type in artificial general intelligence (typing in AGI doesn't work yet, AI still hasn't really landed on most people's radars and won't until the first demonstrable proof of human-like AI intelligence is available.). There's always some new development or story happening each week. In the next five or six years that's going to increase to every couple of days.

It's sort of important that at least some of us are prepared for this arrival. That we don't dubiously dismiss it or take it for granted when it occurs. Since it is going to seem like it appeared all of a sudden it's important to start contemplating it now.

Around the mid 2020's things are going to start getting really insane. A.G.I. will either be on the scene or just about to be on it in the next few years. The first commercial space vehicle will have landed on Mars (and hell, who knows, maybe even people). The neural link will be available to the public (though it'll probably be super expensive). Vehicles will be mostly autonomous... the future is coming at a breakneck pace, and it's nothing like we've ever seen before.

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