“It can happen to you, or it can happen with you, but it will happen.” — Mark Tauschek, The Age Of Exponential IT Is Here
First, let me acknowledge the influence of the late Mogambo Guru with the appearance of “freaking” in this article’s title. I considered it an appropriate amplifier. I hope you will, too.
Up until roughly 1980, Information Technology (IT) was regarded as a black box by those not working in it. Companies ran on numbers, and big boxes like the IBM 370 mainframe and those who conversed with it provided the numbers. To outsiders within the company the whole business of computing was opaque and weird. They just wanted their numbers.
At about the same time, desktop computers—otherwise known as microcomputers or personal computers—were receiving growing attention. They were sold to the general public as a way to have a computer in their homes. Though they couldn’t run a company’s general ledger, with the addition of a “killer” spreadsheet application they could aid accountants in their work, and some companies decided to try a few. Non-computer types were still perplexed at how they worked, but they could now get results on their own—at home, if they wished, because they were affordable.
With the advent of graphical user interfaces, mice, high-speed modems, hi-res displays, and personal printers, along with their continuous improvement, information workers were becoming more productive. A new industry supporting this cohort was growing fast. Microsoft and Apple were already competing and growing, and programmers such as Peter Norton were on the cusp of fame, fortune, and in Norton’s case, philanthropic activity.
So much has happened since then it would take an encyclopedia to document it justly. But to name a few advances—the internet, Tim Berner-Lee and his invention of the World Wide Web, faster and higher capacity chips while remaining steady in price under the influence of Moore’s Law, IBM’s Deep Blue’s win over world chess champion Garry Kasparov, IBM Watson’s victory in Jeopardy, cloud computing providing on-demand IT resources, 3D Graphics Chips, AlexNet, DeepMind’s AlphaGo, the release of AlexNet’s source code, Large Language Models, and the Kurzweil – Kapor wager.
The last item, the bet between two computing legends—Ray Kurzweil and Mitch Kapor—has increased in significance since it was made in 2002. If Kurzweil is judged the winner, then a computer will have successfully reached the level of human-level thinking by or before 2029. Since the judges will themselves be human, a built-in bias is unavoidable.
Success Introduces Monumental Problems
For now, at least, we know what computers can and cannot do. Whatever their limitations, it is clear their development is on an exponential path, and any shortcomings will be short-lived. Some of the strengths of machine intelligence, as presented by Kurzweil, include:
The ability to remember billions of facts precisely and recall them instantly.
Once a skill is mastered by a machine, it can be performed repeatedly at high speed, at optimal accuracy, and without tiring.
Machines can share their knowledge at extremely high speed, compared to the very slow speed of human knowledge-sharing through language.
Machines can pool their resources, intelligence, and memories. Two machines—or one million machines—can join together to become one and then become separate again.
Once machines achieve the ability to design and engineer technology as humans do, only at far higher speeds and capacities, they will have access to their own designs (source code) and the ability to manipulate them.
The combination of these strengths will be formidable, to say the least. And these strengths will continue to grow exponentially.
It’s quite possible this technology could become the exclusive domain of the state, the only organization that “legitimately” acquires its revenue by theft, which it enforces with a vengeance. Despite its elaborate pretensions and propaganda, the state, by its nature, is the enemy of the people, as all criminals are.
This unfortunately is not a popular viewpoint. Most people see the state as at least somewhat helpful, especially those who never questioned their public school indoctrination. To them: Taxes are necessary to keep civilization going, central bank money management keeps us from financial disasters, greedy people make charity too risky to be voluntary, foreign “monsters to destroy” must be crushed in the name of “national security,” US troops must act as global policemen to keep the peace, healthy young men must be forced to fight and kill other healthy young men residing in a different state, and nuclear weapons in our hands are necessary but in the hands of other states are dangerous.
To those who believe anarchy—the absence of a state—fosters chaos and corruption, consider this observation, attributed to Robert Higgs:
Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a “Great Leap Forward” that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.
In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.
If artificial intelligence remains dispersed among competing users, firms, and communities, it may become one of the greatest liberating tools in history. If it is fused with the state, God help us; it could become the most efficient instrument of tyranny ever devised.
