It's important to address our expectations of the future using just one technology that is one of the greatest world-shapers we have on the horizon - Artificial Intelligence. Unless we begin to see just how close great change is to our day, we may not gain any great interest in what else there may be around the corner in the very near future. In other words, if we inch towards belief in our Creator Father, we need to realise just how soon the rapture could be due to massive change coming upon the world anyway. We need to make our decision on faith. The world is poised for momentous change - it's just going to happen... however most do not make the time or have the interest to study in order to realise this.
I want to ensure we have a working knowledge of reality when it comes to projected time frames that humanity has remaining, before (from a secular perspective) we are equaled or superseded by machines, OR (from a spiritual perspective) those with faith in Christ are raptured (removed) and the earth enters into the long-prophesied tribulation period. In fact, it helps to consider our own views on this and whether in fact each of us has a timeframe in mind, of how long this chaotic trend in the world can continue, and importantly, what information that belief is based on.
I think it's a really good idea for the age in which we live, to at least allow ourselves to really ask the question of sustainability on the earth... to have considered whether we are assuming life will continue with relative semblance of what we have lived through so far, or whether dramatic change is even on the horizon of our expectations during our lifetime. What's the likelihood of dramatic change, and how prepared are we, even mentally for this? We have to monitor our belief systems that are very strong, and often overrule our mind in accepting truths involving dramatic change.
For example, when we look at the dramatic change coming to a large percentage of jobs in the world due to the 4th industrial revolution (robotics and automation) where humans are no longer assisted but are actually replaced, I have had responses of complete disbelief from very smart people who simply can't fathom the idea. This is despite numerous studies and experts across the globe detailing just how this will happen, and how soon. This whole area of change, is hard to accept, but if we want to live in the safest place in the world (reality), we need to accept what is real and live accordingly.
Just to simplify the above - those who are seeking truth, must realise that whether or not we believe in God, there is not much time remaining before significant change comes upon the earth, if just from Artificial Intelligence alone. This was echoed magnificently in online blogger and cartoonist Tim Urban's 2015 article titled The AI Revolution - The Road to Superintelligence where he writes"as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what’s happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future."
He summed up the introduction in the following cartoon, showing where we are now standing:
This is where we stand as humanity today - on the very edge of great change.
Urban asks the question: how does it feel to stand in that place above? Well, it actually feels like this below:
But this is how it feels to stand in that place today.... normal!
Most of us have no idea or ability to comprehend just how dramatic this shift will be, and how soon. Urban makes some cases for dates, however being 2015, they would be shorter now. Since that article, Google's DeepMind has surprised experts by achieving a feat in 2016 that was not anticipated until 2027. In case there are some doubts (and I still have a hard time thinking through the implications the evidence points to myself), I will discuss just a few recent developments in regards to AI.
Quick Artificial Intelligence overview
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the ability computers are gaining to think for themselves, reproduce, and to be allowed to apply this new-found ability in most areas of life. Think legal cases, medical procedures and diagnosis, financial market decisions, military, engineering design, cultural and social predictions, teaching, crime solving and policing - every area we operate in life as humans could be matched or superseded by machines soon. (In fact, Silicon Valley engineers will have soon developed technology allowing our brains to be uploaded onto AI and "live forever" according to Julian Assange's recent comments.) There has already been an AI art competition, and AI can create music from scratch, and is used in everyday life in a basic form through Apple's Siri or in Facebook's image searches etc... it's used behind the scenes in a lot of areas.
That's the basic idea. It comes from a desire to be super-human or to augment our abilities. We already have that in a primitive form through our smartphones connected to the rest of the world.
Spiritually, it is a consequence of the desire we all have to reconnect back to our originally-designed state, in harmony with our Creator Father, creation, and each other. Having the Spirit of the Creator within us, is what we are all actually looking for. Pursuing technology allowing us to be "godlike" (a term that often comes up) is attempting to get around this without needing to humble ourselves to accept God literally giving Himself to us.
In fact, to pursue the decidedly spiritual tone this is all taking these days, it might be worth noting Geordie Rose's comment a few years ago about the D-Wave Quantum computer (clients include Google, NASA, Lockheed and others) tapping into parallel universes and that standing near one is like standing near an altar to an alien god. Almost like it has a heartbeat. The spiritual tone is coming into these technologies because it's an expression of the deepest parts of us and could well be accessing other dimensions. Some have said in relation to quantum, that it's the intersection of the spirit and physical worlds.
In 2013, Ray Kurzweil, the inventor, author, and transhumanist who had recently become Google's director of engineering, said that by about 2023, computers will have gained a state similar to human consciousness. Bill Gates has said that "Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence." Of course, these dates are old news now - see this MIT Technology Review article describing an AI algorithm that drove a car by itself, without a single instruction from an engineer or programmer... or this article about Google's AI brain that can "teach and think for itself". It's only 2017 people and we have AI algorithms thinking for themselves in a way that's not completely clear even to those that invented them...
AI is generally moving at a pace faster than most experts can predict. A lot of this has to do with its ability to self-learn and how it is connected with so many other resources and things all at once. Think exponential on top of exponential. When DeepMind (purchased by Google's parent company Alphabet) beat the reigning champ (Lee Sedol) at the ancient and incredibly complex game of Go in 2016, the experts were surprised for at least a couple of reasons: firstly they weren't exactly sure how it's software was actually producing these astounding moves to win 4 from 5 games, and secondly, their own predictions on when it would be capable of doing this were way off track.
They had thought it would take until 2027 for their deep learning algorithms to be clever enough to beat the 18-time world champ at this intuitive game. Instead, it did it in 2016. That is 11 years off target, which when thinking exponentially for technology, is a few generations off target. To see just how complex this new way of processing is, see this one-page explanation.
Just this week, DeepMind has announced it's most recent version of AlphaGo (called Zero). The difference this time, is that it learned to play by itself and used less than 10% of the processing power of previous versions, and it beat the version of itself that beat Lee Sedol last year! It is a big step towards Artificial General Intelligence, as according to lead programmer David Silver, who revealed a key to it's success was “We’ve actually removed the constraints of human knowledge.” and learned by itself from the ground up. Here's a quick snapshot of what is has achieved:
Zero developed its Go skills by competing against itself. It started with random moves on the board, but every time it won, Zero updated its own system, and played itself again. And again. Millions of times over.
After three days of self-play, Zero was strong enough to defeat the version of itself that beat 18-time world champion Lee Se-dol, winning handily — 100 games to nil.
Just 12 months after defeating Lee Sedol, we have a version that uses a fraction of the power, that taught itself from scratch in just 3 days to a standard that could beat it's ancestor-relative 100 games to nil. The programmers are now moving onto everyday practical applications now that they have developed a rudimentary generally-intelligent algorithm. See an additional article about this here.
““We’ve actually removed the constraints of human knowledge””
Remember Tim Urban's article above? In it, he showed how around 75-80% of experts are generally pessimistic about AI, which has been coined as about to be either the best, or worst, thing ever to happen to humanity.
How about Google? As one of the world's richest companies and biggest investors into AI, how would you feel hearing the following from Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder and current president of it's parent Alphabet, who said earlier this year, that he is "surprised" by the speed of AI advancements. In terms of the future he makes the following bombshell statement:"It’s an incredible time and it’s very hard to forecast what can these things do," he said. "We don’t really know the limits."
Now, let's take a moment to pause. One of the world's biggest investors into an area that will have the biggest impact on humanity, still doesn't know "what these things can do" yet is going full steam ahead anyway. That is about as far from any responsible "risk assessment" behaviour that you can get. When I worked in mining, we used to complete risk assessments for any task we did. If the possible outcome was a risk we couldn't afford, we would ensure the risk was contained before undertaking the work. The problem we have with AI, is that once we realise the risk, it's already too late. If we achieve general intelligence, the leap to superintelligence (thus surpassing the intelligence of all of humanity combined) might only be a very short time afterwards (read Tim Urban's article to get an idea about this). The potential rewards are outweighing the potential catastrophic risk, and so we continue.
““It’s an incredible time and it’s very hard to forecast what can these things do,” he said. “We don’t really know the limits.””
Some very rich companies are racing to the finish line of AI dominance. Think Google, Microsoft, Baidu, Amazon, Facebook and Apple.
Just last month, Time Magazine's voted most influential person in the world 3 years in a row, Vladmir Putin stated of AI that "the one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world." Wow. The potential of mastering AI may be nothing other than to be ruler of the world. Now there's a motivation to act.
““the one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world.””
Hmmm... enter Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. They along with other prominent concerned individuals have started the Open AI group that aims to safely navigate this path to AI "freedom" for humanity. Musk's theory is that if we can't beat AI (he believes we can't) then we need to join. OpenAI is attempting to slow down this race to the end.
So he's also started a company, announced in April 2017 employing some of the world's best neuro and software experts hoping that within 4 years, a human brain can be connected to computers and the internet. He stated about Neuralink that "If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy" and contacted Tim Urban who studied Neuralink for 6 weeks in order to write this mammoth post about how this is going to work. The interesting thing is that even Musk is not convinced his timeframes are short enough in order to remain with some semblance of control with AI.
His idea of injecting a neural lace, to wirelessly attach the human brain to machines is well publicised.
““If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy””
Just this week, John McNamara, senior inventor and IT specialist at IBM's innovation centre in the UK, described our reality within what he currently estimates of about 2 decades as having AI nano-machines injected into our bloodstreams, to repair our bodies, and also effectively "meld" man and machine, making humans super-human - controlling our environment with our thoughts and gestures and accessing vast computing power directly with our brains.
A common response to concerns about computing power overcoming our minds in this scenario, is that connected brains must consent in order to access "us". To me, that assumes a healthy mind that can always be self-aware and strong in order to prevent unwanted access...has anyone thought about how powerful a superintelligent AI might be in accessing our brains once connected to all things? Especially if it has an agenda or goal that it discovers is not compatible with ours?
One of the things about the development of AI that people like Musk elaborate on, is that when it becomes intelligent enough to control the world through the IoT, it's unlikely we'd even know about it. It would have a way of making us think we are still in control, while getting what it wants.
If AI is applied in humanoid robots with superhuman physical abilities, biometric scanning and infrared technologies embedded with connection to an all-knowledge worldwide database, with ability to think in a conscious-like manner, look completely human, and know more about you than you do in any given moment... how would you feel if one of these approached you on the street or knocked on your door? Approached your car as law enforcement? Greeted you at the door of your university? Humanoid robots are already fulfilling roles of porters in hotels, university receptionists (who recognise you and remember previous conversations) and many other areas. It's not far away.
AI algorithms already drive search engines such as Google, and are already being used to shape our opinions. This video from Steve Cioccolanti in May 2017 was a good example showing how biased Google can be in returning search results pointing us in a certain direction (eg Hillary vs Trump).
In addition, it's recently been uncovered that Google has a list of sites it doesn't want us to see (no surprise). Of course controversy does not agree with all - and not all these sites will be agreeable to us all - but isn't that the point? To be able to investigate in order to form opinions and not be at the mercy of gatekeepers? It really points to the development of the hive mind where we are just part of a one-ness, thinking the same, doing the same, while being taught we "actually have freedom"... hmmm
Remember - it's more likely these days to overestimate the time taken to make technology predictions, than underestimate them. We simply don't know how quickly things will progress in this field with the help of AI. Remember the AlphaGo estimate of 2027 which turned out to be 2016? In the language of decades, this is an achievement in a fraction of the estimated time. Could this happen again with John McNamara's estimate of 2 decades? Could it be just 1 decade before we have injections of AI nano-bots that connect a human brain to all things? A quarter of a decade... just 5 years in the end? Could Elon Musk's general estimate of around 8 years for the average human brain to have a neural lace, injected and attaching to our brain actually only be 4 years, with partial connection in just 2?
I think this is enough to put the point out there - we are in for a very different world very soon, using current predictions and technology that we know about, if just for the development of AI alone.
However we need to consider the convergence of technologies that will relate with AI such as Quantum computing, DNA modification and bio-engineering, robotics and the Internet of Things (IoT), findings at CERN, plus considering the technologies we don't know about and how developed they are behind the scenes. In addition, we haven't considered the many other world events and earth-changes and their potential to be world-changers in the near future. We are already in a time of unprecedented earth changes with record breaking floods, fires, earthquakes, solar flares, mass evacuations, shootings and debt (all of which have happened over the last 8 weeks!)... none of this is happening in a vacuum. It is beyond the scope of this article to point out how these convergences will increase the rate of AI development and facilitate it's powerful effect on the world soon.
Hopefully we can agree, that the reality of our soon-future world is vastly different from today, and in my view, has hallmarks of an inbalance of power and control, and points to unsustainability in the medium term.
If we can begin to consider a timeframe where humanity will need intervention from the convergence of many powerful and fast-moving technologies alone, we need to work back 7 years to place ourselves at the start of the Great Tribulation which is preceded by the rapture of the church. It's not hard to see how close that may be. It's time to ensure our faith is in the One who is loving, powerful, and has provided a way to be reconciled to Himself to a place we were originally designed to be. I invite you to read the good news and take action today.
For now, I pray our loving Creator Father YHWH's love and mercy upon your life today.