The Seventh Seal ...

Illustration by Ricardo Santos

As everyone knows, There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch applies to every endeavor, including AI, the open ended tech forever to remain unknowable thanks to code writing code in order for said tech to react to the real world in realtime, may soon become the stuff of nightmares but this time, it's a lucid dream civilization is currently having regarding the specter of AI and what it means to the future of mankind.

TANSTAAFL: a plan for a new economic world order. (Pierre Dos Utt, 1949)

Google cofounder Larry Page thinks superintelligent AI is “just the next step in evolution.” In fact, Page, who’s worth about $120 billion, has reportedly argued that efforts to prevent AI-driven extinction and protect human consciousness are “speciesist” and “sentimental nonsense.”

In July, former Google DeepMind senior scientist Richard Sutton — one of the pioneers of reinforcement learning, a major subfield of AI — said that the technology “could displace us from existence,” and that “we should not resist succession.” In a 2015 talk, Sutton said, suppose “everything fails” and AI “kill[s] us all”; he asked, “Is it so bad that humans are not the final form of intelligent life in the universe?”

“Biological extinction, that’s not the point,” Sutton, sixty-six, told me. “The light of humanity and our understanding, our intelligence — our consciousness, if you will — can go on without meat humans.”

It gets better

Deep learning powers the most advanced AI systems in the world, from DeepMind’s protein-folding model to large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. No one really understands how deep learning systems work, but their performance has continued to improve nonetheless. These systems aren’t designed to function according to a set of well-understood principles but are instead “trained” to analyze patterns in large datasets, with complex behavior — like language understanding — emerging as a consequence. AI developer Connor Leahy told me, “It’s more like we’re poking something in a Petri dish” than writing a piece of code. The October position paper warns that “no one currently knows how to reliably align AI behavior with complex values.”

Curvature 2018

It's all about the money.

In spite of all this uncertainty, AI companies see themselves as being in a race to make these systems as powerful as they can — without a workable plan to understand how the things they’re creating actually function, all while cutting corners on safety to win more market share. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the holy grail that leading AI labs are explicitly working toward. AGI is often defined as a system that is at least as good as humans at almost any intellectual task. It’s also the thing that Bengio and Hinton believe could lead to the end of humanity.

Endgame.

Bizarrely, many of the people actively advancing AI capabilities think there’s a significant chance that doing so will ultimately cause the apocalypse. A 2022 survey of machine learning researchers found that nearly half of them thought there was at least a 10 percent chance advanced AI could lead to “human extinction or [a] similarly permanent and severe disempowerment” of humanity. Just months before he cofounded OpenAI, Altman said, “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”

The Seventh Seal

When reading the Jacobin piece, an indirect connect to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal readily comes to mind as a Disillusioned knight Antonius Block and his cynical squire Jöns return from the Crusades to find the country ravaged by the plague. The knight encounters Death, whom he challenges to a chess match, believing he can survive as long as the game continues.

Death and Antonius Block choose sides for the chess game

At least Death agreed but will AI?