SCIENCE-FICTION WRITER INSISTS ‘SINGULARITY’ WON’T MATERIALIZE

Ted Chiang, an award-winning science fiction author, has dashed to smithereens the much-anticipated dawn of “singularity,” when artificial intelligence (AI) takes over and reduces humanity to a brotherhood of slaves, saying it would be like waiting for Godot, who never comes.

Writing for the New Yorker, Chiang said “computer hardware and software are the latest cognitive technologies, and they are powerful aids to innovation, but they can’t generate a technological explosion by themselves. You need people to do that, and the more the better. Giving better hardware and software to one smart individual is helpful, but the real benefits come when everyone has them. Our current technological explosion is a result of billions of people using those cognitive tools… Could AI programs take the place of those humans, so that an explosion occurs in the digital realm faster than it does in ours? Possibly, but let’s think about what it would require. The strategy most likely to succeed would be essentially to duplicate all of human civilization in software, with eight billion human-equivalent AIs going about their business.”

He added: “That’s probably cost-prohibitive, so the task then becomes identifying the smallest subset of human civilization that can generate most of the innovation you’re looking for. One way to think about this is to ask: How many people do you need to put together a Manhattan Project? Note that this is different from asking how many scientists actually worked on the Manhattan Project. The relevant question is: How large of a population do you need to draw from in order to recruit enough scientists to staff such an effort?"

“This ability of humans to build on one another’s work is precisely why I don’t believe that running a human-equivalent AI program for 100 years in isolation is a good way to produce major breakthroughs. An individual working in complete isolation can come up with a breakthrough but is unlikely to do so repeatedly; you’re better off having a lot of people drawing inspiration from one another. They don’t have to be directly collaborating; any field of research will simply do better when it has many people working in it,” he noted. Chiang said machines can only produce what they are programmed to generate, and without human intelligence behind AI, it cannot create its own “singularity.”

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