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Asked by the writer Sebastian Mallaby if it will be a bigger change than the Industrial Revolution, he replied:<\/p>\n
Yeah, I think so. Maybe AI is more like fire and language. Or maybe it\u2019s as big as the emergence of the prefrontal cortex in humans. I mean, it\u2019s on a level where tens of thousands of years ago some brilliant person had the idea of making handprints on the wall\u2026 The AI age [is] the age where information becomes live. It starts to process itself, to generate itself. It becomes autonomous.<\/p>\n
Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Hassabis and those who know him, Mallaby\u2019s book The Infinity Machine is a definitive portrait of a genius of 21st-century science at the forefront of a technological revolution. Hassabis is the opposite of a rigid, doctrinaire rationalist. His master project came to him through a succession of epiphanies. Chance encounters with friends and books melded with a formidable singleness of purpose. Hassabis\u2019s idea of a super-intelligent machine was first articulated in the business plan he wrote in 2020 with his then-colleague Mustafa Suleyman. Summarising the plan, Mallaby writes:<\/p>\n
Society faced problems of unprecedented complexity, from stabilising capitalism, which had blown up in the financial crisis of 2008, to feeding an expanding population\u2026 the human brain had limited storage capacity; humans had limited lifespans; grouping humans together resulted in diminishing returns because big organisations are sluggish. In sum, the intricacy of society\u2019s most pressing challenges lay beyond the reach of human capabilities\u2026 AGI is the solution to this problem.<\/p>\n
Humankind would transcend its limitations by building an infinite machine. It was a semi-mystical vision, and from the start there were doubts. Suleyman, an opponent of the Iraq War, was alarmed to discover that the defence contractor Palantir was using AI to help American forces track terrorist suspects. His unease mounted when he visited the office of a military-robotics venture to find a gun mounted on a pair of caterpillar treads. \u201cThis was not the vision of AI that we were trying to build,\u201d he recalled. It would prove to be a prescient remark.<\/p>\n
When artificial intelligence enters the human world, it is entangled in all the world\u2019s conflicts. The story Mallaby tells is one of commercial rivalry and intrigue, with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and others seizing the business opportunities offered by the new technology. Human behaviour is little changed by the approach of the Singularity \u2013 an explosive advance in knowledge of the kind envisioned by the transhumanist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990). Antagonistic interests and values, personal ambition and pride are as important as they have ever been.<\/p>\n
Like many after them, the authors of the business plan wrote as if identifying society\u2019s problems is unproblematic. But not everyone perceived the financial crisis as a reason for stabilising capitalism. For socialists, populists and environmentalists, the near collapse showed the need for a different economic system. Rebooting an unsustainable status quo would only lead to a worse crisis.<\/p>\n
The problem with \u201cproblem-solving\u201d becomes clearer when you look beyond the economy. Are rising divorce rates a symptom of family breakdown or a mark of female empowerment? Would a society in which assisted dying is normalised be better because it enhanced personal autonomy and reduced suffering, or worse because it devalued lives that others judged not worth living? What counts as a problem is a value judgement, not a matter of fact. Every society contains diverging ideals and norms, generating conflict between and within communities and individuals. That is why technocracy so rarely works. Managerial government assumes a consensus on values that does not exist.<\/p>\n
AGI may simplify administration and deliver services more efficiently in Byzantine bureaucracies such as the NHS. It can strip out layers of costly management in organisations across society, though that is not without risk. It cannot resolve ethical issues to do with the value of life or the limits of choice. The difficulty is not complexity. It is the fact that conflicts of values are not technically soluble problems.<\/p>\n
The arrival of AGI will be a metaphysical shock, but not because it threatens our extinction as a species. It will erode and erase our sense of what makes us special. We have been taught that we alone are conscious beings, distinct and separate from the insentient material world. The roots of this in theistic religion are clear. In animist cultures, consciousness is recognised as a natural phenomenon, which extends to trees, flowers, insects and birds, as well as human artefacts like houses and dolls. If only humans have God\u2019s gift of ensoulment, it makes perfect sense to think they are unique in possessing consciousness.<\/p>\n
Set aside this anthropocentric faith, and conscious awareness can be understood as an emergent property of matter. The early-19th century Italian poet, philologist and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi observed in his zibaldone (commonplace book): \u201cWe know matter can think because we ourselves are matter that thinks.\u201d A similar view was defended by Benedict Spinoza. In part two of Ethics, the heretical 17th-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher declared that matter and mind are one and the same.<\/p>\n
A shimmer in the dust, consciousness is not a binary, on-off condition, but fluctuating and intermittent. We sleep and dream and drift in and out of delirium in fevers. Our most life-changing thoughts and acts come to us unbidden, as if of their own volition. Consciousness and intentionality come and go. Why can\u2019t machines evolve to become as self-aware as humans, if not more so?<\/p>\n
This is not a new question. In the historian of science George Dyson\u2019s path-breaking Darwin Among the Machines (1997), evolution is not confined to biological organisms. Evolution in machines is not exactly Darwinian \u2013 the natural selection of random genetic mutations. Rather iteratively improving models \u2013 which were initially designed by humans \u2013 adapt, self-organise and learn to interact with and teach one another. These digital minds can write, reason, converse and create networks that operate at speeds humans cannot match. As Dyson writes pithily: \u201cIn the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of machines.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to James Lovelock\u2019s Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (2019), AGI is the next phase in the evolution of the Earth. For the author of the Gaia theory, the planet functions a self-regulating system, and nature and machines are parts of that system. A planetary hyper-intelligence could control climate change, so that sections of the biosphere, including humans, could be preserved. Lovelock had a benign view of our post-human successors. They might see us as plants, \u201c\u2026 beings locked into an extraordinarily slow process of perception and action\u201d. If they cared for us, it might be as humans care for flowers in gardens.<\/p>\n
Intellectual resistance to the rise of sentient machines is not scientific in origin. It invokes a supposedly self-evident truth: chatbots can\u2019t have qualia \u2013 the first-person, \u201cfelt\u201d qualities of subjective experience. These inner states depend on embodiment \u2013 having (or being) a biological organism with sensory organs. But consciousness has evolved in species with bodies very different from ours. Does the octopus lack inner life? Surely not. Why then must machines? It cannot be long before machines acquire qualia from the metallic carcasses and sensors of robots.<\/p>\n
The metaphysical shock of AI comes with the realisation that matter can be intelligent. The sociopolitical shock comes from the fact that human intelligence is losing its scarcity value. Think twice about becoming an interpreter or translator, an advertising copywriter or university lecturer, a solicitor, accountant or hedge fund trader. The \u201cknowledge classes\u201d are facing an immiseration akin to that suffered by farm labourers displaced by tractors in the Industrial Revolution, but at a much-accelerated rate. Far from ushering in an \u201cera of abundance\u201d as promised by Silicon Valley futurists, AI risks bringing a new age of mass poverty \u2013 and with it, a new kind of revolutionary politics. The infantile left-populism of the Greens is a harbinger of more hard-edged movements to come.<\/p>\n
Human redundancy extends to personal relationships. Always on tap, never complaining and seemingly costless, chatbots are filing a void once occupied by friends, partners and therapists. For those who want instant interaction in their time-starved lives, contact with other people is hardly worth the effort.<\/p>\n
As it unstitches the way we have lived, AI is eroding our sense of reality. Deepfakes are making the internet into an impenetrable labyrinth. Respected thinkers such as the former Greek finance minister and critic of techno-feudalism Yanis Varoufakis are finding internet avatars spouting their ideas, cleverly modified to serve suspect agendas. As we enter the next election cycle, politicians will undergo the same digital alchemy. Nothing is solid or substantial. Yet this age of dematerialisation is also one of robotised warfare, in which cities are razed, flesh burnt and the material infrastructure of human life reduced to rubble.<\/p>\n
Predictably, there is a growing movement dedicated to \u201cstopping\u201d AI. In February 2024, activists demanding a global ban on AGI research shackled themselves to OpenAI\u2019s headquarters in San Francisco. There have also been calls from within the industry. In March 2023, an open letter was signed by over 1,000 insiders \u2013 including Elon Musk \u2013 demanding a pause: \u201cShould we develop non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?\u201d In July of that year, leaders from the industry showed up at the White House to sign up to voluntary, non-binding commitments to prioritise safety and transparency.<\/p>\n
Rightly, Hassabis declined to sign the letter. He has proposed an international body to coordinate the last steps to AGI. But he accepts that if only one or two corporations or countries don\u2019t comply, \u201cit could be seriously existential for humanity\u201d. Global bans are unenforceable. The US or EU may prohibit some lines of research or regulate them out of existence. China will press on, along with an increasing number of other countries. There is no \u201cwe\u201d that could halt the process.<\/p>\n
The forbidden truth is that technology is not simply a tool. Electricity and the internet altered the world and human beings themselves in ways nobody could envision. AGI may have a comparable or greater impact. The most modern of technologies is dissolving the modern myth of human autonomy. The ancient world was wiser. Western theism may be anthropocentric, but it channelled the reality that human beings cannot live just as they will. The message of Greek myth was the same: Prometheus is chained to a rock for stealing the sacred fire.<\/p>\n
Those who look to AI for salvation are searching for deus absconditus \u2013 a planetary super-intelligence that echoes the absent God of monotheism. The true danger is a pantheon of contending gods. If disaster comes, it will be from systems serving opposed geopolitical agendas. A super-fast, AI-enabled thermonuclear exchange would kill billions of people, but it would more likely destroy the warring machine-minds than our slow-moving species. No fresh water and no electricity mean no data centres and no super-mind. It is not difficult to imagine scattered human survivors reverting to a pre-modern way of life and, like the stalkers in Roadside Picnic, scavenging the detritus of a vanished civilisation for miraculous relics of the aliens that built and ended it.<\/p>\n
Hassabis has confessed to being haunted by the figure of Robert Oppenheimer, who in building the atomic bomb to prevent the extinction of civilisation by Nazi barbarism created a weapon that could destroy much of humanity. That the British pioneer grasps the existential risks of the new technology while refusing the illusory prospect of curbing its development does him much credit. There is more dignity in being a player than in vainly trying to exit the game. AI is not bent on destroying us. Like the human animal, it is a sport of nature. The question is whether we can learn how to coexist with it. In the end, the alien minds we struggle to understand are our own.<\/p>\n
The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence
Sebastian Mallaby
Allen Lane, 480pp, \u00a330<\/p>\n
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[Further reading: Patrick Radden Keefe\u2019s obituary for Britain<\/a>]<\/p>\n Content from our partners<\/p>\n