Everything Is F*cked(62)

Already, AI programs have invented their own languages that humans can’t decipher, become more effective than doctors at diagnosing pneumonia, and even written passable chapters of Harry Potter fan fiction.8 At the time of this writing, we’re on the cusp of having self-driving cars, automated legal advice, and even computer-generated art and music.9

Slowly but surely, AI will become better than we are at pretty much everything: medicine, engineering, construction, art, technological innovation. You’ll watch movies created by AI, and discuss them on websites or mobile platforms built by AI, moderated by AI, and it might even turn out that the “person” you’ll argue with will be an AI.

But as crazy as that sounds, it’s just the beginning. Because here is where the bananas will really hit the fan: the day an AI can write AI software better than we can.

When that day comes, when an AI can essentially spawn better versions of itself, at will, then buckle your seatbelt, amigo, be cause it’s going to be a wild ride and we will no longer have control over where we’re going.

AI will reach a point where its intelligence outstrips ours by so much that we will no longer comprehend what it’s doing. Cars will pick us up for reasons we don’t understand and take us to locations we didn’t know existed. We will unexpectedly receive medications for health issues we didn’t know we suffered from. It’s possible that our kids will switch schools, we will change jobs, economic policies will abruptly shift, governments will rewrite their constitutions—and none of us will comprehend the full reasons why. It will just happen. Our Thinking Brains will be too slow, and our Feeling Brains too erratic and dangerous. Like AlphaZero inventing chess strategies in mere hours that chess’s greatest minds could not anticipate, advanced AI could reorganize society and all our places within it in ways we can’t imagine.

Then, we will end up right back where we began: worshipping impossible and unknowable forces that seemingly control our fates. Just as primitive humans prayed to their gods for rain and flame—the same way they made sacrifices, offered gifts, devised rituals, and altered their behavior and appearance to curry favor with the naturalistic gods—so will we. But instead of the primitive gods, we will offer ourselves up to the AI gods.

We will develop superstitions about the algorithms. If you wear this, the algorithms will favor you. If you wake at a certain hour and say the right thing and show up at the right place, the machines will bless you with great fortune. If you are honest and you don’t hurt others and you take care of yourself and your family, the AI gods will protect you.

The old gods will be replaced by the new gods: the algorithms. And in a twist of evolutionary irony, the same science that killed the gods of old will have built the gods of new. There will be a great return to religiosity among mankind. And our religions won’t necessarily be so different from the religions of the ancient world—after all, our psychology is fundamentally evolved to deify what it doesn’t understand, to exalt the forces that help or harm us, to construct systems of values around our experiences, to seek out conflict that generates hope.

Why would AI be any different?

Our AI gods will understand this, of course. And either they will find a way to “upgrade” our brains out of our primitive psychological need for continuous strife, or they will simply manufacture artificial strife for us. We will be like their pet dogs, convinced that we are protecting and fighting for our territory at all costs but, in reality, merely peeing on an endless series of digital fire hydrants.

This may frighten you. This may excite you. Either way, it is likely inevitable. Power emerges from the ability to manipulate and process information, and we always end up worshipping whatever has the most power over us.

So, allow me to say that I, for one, welcome our AI overlords.

I know, that’s not the final religion you were hoping for. But that’s where you went wrong: hoping.

Don’t lament the loss of your own agency. If submitting to artificial algorithms sounds awful, understand this: you already do. And you like it.

The algorithms already run much of our lives. The route you took to work is based on an algorithm. Many of the friends you talked to this week? Those conversations were based on an algorithm. The gift you bought your kid, the amount of toilet paper that came in the deluxe pack, the fifty cents in savings you got for being a rewards member at the supermarket—all the result of algorithms.

We need these algorithms because they make our lives easier. And so will the algorithm gods of the near future. And as we did with the gods of the ancient world, we will rejoice in and give thanks to them. Indeed, it will be impossible to imagine life without them.10 These algorithms make our lives better. They make our lives more efficient. They make us more efficient.

That’s why, as soon as we cross over, there’s no going back.


We Are Bad Algorithms

Here’s one last way to look at the history of the world:

The difference between life and stuff is that life is stuff that self-replicates. Life is made out of cells and DNA that spawn more and more copies of themselves.

Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, some of these primordial life forms developed feedback mechanisms to better reproduce themselves. An early protozoon might evolve little sensors on its membrane to better detect amino acids by which to replicate more copies of itself, thus giving it an advantage over other single-cell organisms. But then maybe some other single-cell organism develops a way to “trick” other little amoeba-like things’ sensors, thus interfering with their ability to find food, and giving itself an advantage.