AI and the (Really) Big Picture

JÜRGEN SCHMIDHUBER, SOMETIMES CALLED THE FATHER OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, TRACES THE ROOTS OF AI BACK TO THE BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE.

In a sense, Schmidhuber believes the roots of AI reach back to the beginning of time itself.

“In 2014, I found a beautiful pattern of exponential acceleration in it,” said Schmidhuber—co-founder and chief scientist at the Swiss AI firm NNAISENSE and director of the AI Initiative, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

Based on that pattern, “history seems to converge in an Omega point in the year 2040 or so.” The “Omega” is how he refers to the idea others call the singularity.

“Let’s start with the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. We divide this time by four to obtain about 3.5 billion years,” Schmidhuber said. At that point— Omega minus 3.5 billion years—life emerged on Earth.

Divide by four again, and you get to 900 million years ago when animal-like life emerged. Do it again, and you get to roughly the point when mammals appeared.

Keep that up, Schmidhuber said, and you find dates that coincide with when the first primates emerged, the first hominids emerged, when humans invented stone tools, when we first controlled fire, and other historical and technological milestones.

BART SELMAN

Schmidhuber said 2030 will be “Omega minus 13 years.” At “more or less the year 2030,” he said, “Cheap AIs will have human brain power.” Then during the final 13 years or so until Omega, “incredible things will happen.”

“But of course, time won’t stop with Omega. Maybe it’s just human-dominated history that will end,” Schmidhuber said. “After Omega, many curious metalearning AIs that invent their own goals … will quickly improve themselves, restricted only by the fundamental limits of computability and physics.”

And what happens then? Supersmart AIs might explore space, build self-replicating robot factories in the asteroid belt and “transform the solar system and within a few hundred thousand years the entire galaxy and within tens of billions of years the rest of the reachable universe. Despite the light-speed limit, the expanding AI sphere will have plenty of time to colonize and shape the entire visible cosmos.”

“The universe is still young, only 13.8 billion years old,” Schmidhuber said. When the universe is four times older—about 55 billion years old— he expects the visible cosmos to be “permeated by intelligence. Because after Omega, most AIs will have to go where most of the physical resources are to make more and bigger AIs. Those who don’t won’t have an impact.” a university? That I could see automated. I’m not sure where everybody would find these extra jobs.

Mind. Blown.

Schmidhuber: It’s easy to predict which jobs will disappear but hard to predict which new jobs will be created. Two hundred years ago, most jobs in the Western world were in agriculture. Today, only 1-2%. Nevertheless, unemployment rates are low, especially in countries with many robots per capita. Why? Because humans invented lots of new jobs.

Domingos: I agree. AI will create many new kinds of jobs, as previous forms of automation have. It will create jobs in areas that complement it, and it will make many things cheaper, leaving people with more money that will be spent on other things and create more jobs.

ChatGPT: While the consensus is that AI will create more jobs than it destroys, it’s important to understand the potential disruption of jobs due to generative and other forms of AI. Therefore, employers, workers and policymakers should take proactive steps to prepare for the potential disruption of jobs caused by AI.

What is your biggest concern about the recent acceleration in AI capabilities?

Domingos: That people will mistake these capabilities for artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Schmidhuber: I am not concerned about the acceleration of AI; I welcome it. The acceleration is not so recent either: since 1941, when Konrad Zuse completed the first working program-controlled computer, every five years, computing got 10 times cheaper. Today, 80 years later, hardware is millions of billions times faster per unit price. Our AIs have greatly profited from this acceleration.

Yampolskiy: The concern is we have gotten good at creating very capable systems. But the safety

PROFESSOR OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, CORNELL UNIVERSITY AND FELLOW OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTING MACHINERY, AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE AND ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE