Narain Batra hosts the podcast “America Unbound.” He lives in the Upper Valley.
In mid-November 2023, Barbra Streisand, a Hollywood celebrity, talking with talk-show host Stephen Colbert, expressed deep sadness over the ongoing dreadful violence in Gaza. She said, “It’s sad about what’s going on today — meaning people have to live together, even though they’re different religions or whatever. This is insanity for us not to learn how to live together in peace. I could easily cry about this.”
Then with her deeply anguished face, she looked up and said, “Where is God in this time? Where is he or she? Why can’t that energy stop this madness?”
I kept thinking that instead of waiting for gods to help us, and humans have been invoking gods for millennia, what if we have superintelligence that could enhance our intellectual capabilities and collaborate with us to solve our most intractable problems? The Hamas attack did not erupt out of nothing. Long preparations must have gone into its planning and execution, the killings and kidnappings, the events that shocked the world.
It seems that humanity has reached its maximum level of competence. Or you might say, paraphrasing the Peter Principle, humanity has reached its level of incompetence. It is our incompetence that poses an existential threat to humanity. Superintelligence could have foreseen the Hamas Oct. 7 horrendous attack on Israel.
Of the four categories of AI, traditional AI performs predefined tasks and within its trained domain it excels at pattern recognition, analysis, and decision-making. Pfizer and Moderna harnessed AI to speed up the discovery, development, manufacturing, and distribution of their COVID-19 vaccines.
Generative AI, ChatGPT and other large language models, mimic and synthesize contents from the ocean of materials it’s trained on. A prompt-based multilingual conversational model, generative AI has the potential to democratize knowledge. Through easy-to-use prompts, and the availability of instant translation in several languages, generative AI would raise the collective intelligence level of people and make societies more productive. GPT-4o, for example, responds in text, audio, and video in real-time, comparable to human response time in conversation, enabling more natural and seamless interactions in more than 50 languages including non-English languages.
We are entering a new age of interactive orality, where a person could use an oral prompt with a chatbot that would open the door to knowledge in any field without the person being literate in the traditional sense. Generative AI gives a new meaning to the biblical utterance, “Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you.”
When generative AI is trained to use real-world observations and tools, its capabilities will grow exponentially. The tools-using generative AI would be no different from tools-using humans except that generative AI would keep learning and improving by using the same techniques as we do to ask questions, do research, and even write code to incorporate into itself to grow and evolve into a higher level.
As generative AI systems keep learning, the rise of artificial general intelligence is inevitable. This upward spiral of self-learning leading to artificial general intelligence, a system as smart as humans, would eventually evolve into superintelligence, a system superior to human cognitive abilities. Limited by our biology, even the best of us stop learning at some point in time.
Superintelligence would surpass human intelligence in every domain, including scientific reasoning, creativity, and knowledge, functioning at a level beyond the intellectual capacity of any human, no matter how intelligent the person, Albert Einstein, or Robert Oppenheimer, for example. Superintelligence would see things that we don’t see. Most importantly, it would be a self-improving system that would recursively enhance its capabilities. Humans too keep improving but up to a certain point. Einstein could go so far.
Superintelligent space rockets and satellites could accelerate space exploration and colonization. It could foresee new epidemics and design new drugs with unmatched target specificity and reduced side effects. It could model complex climate systems and guide the development of clean energy technologies. It could analyze complex geopolitical scenarios and propose solutions before the catastrophe strikes. It would enable us to see dimensions of reality that we can’t see because of our limited intelligence.
Superintelligence forces us to confront fundamental questions about ourselves and our place in the universe. What does it mean to be intelligent? Closely linked to intelligence is the question of consciousness. We experience the world subjectively, with emotions, feelings, and a sense of self. Would superintelligence possess this quality? Some argue that consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems, and with enough processing power, superintelligence could achieve it. Others believe consciousness is unique to biological systems and cannot be replicated in machines. The answer to this question has profound implications.
Human imagination, along with intuition, is a powerful cognitive capacity that drives creativity, problem-solving, and the ability to transcend the constraints of the present moment, and shapes our individual and collective experiences. Could superintelligence imagine, dream, fantasize, or mythologize? This ongoing dialogue is crucial to navigating the legal, ethical, and philosophical challenges posed by superintelligence. We need to understand and feel ensured that superintelligence has values aligned with human values, and becomes a collaborator in enhancing our freedoms, and our humanity.
While Barbra Streisand wondered why God was indifferent to human sufferings in the horrific Gaza-Israel War, I have been wondering what if one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, Einstein, had a superintelligent AI collaborator. Their partnership would have been a mind-boggling fusion of human creativity and AI’s superpower. Developed with appropriate safeguards and oversight, superintelligence could be another incremental step in human evolution.