Tag Archives: prediction

Consciousness and AI – REVISITED

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In my post, Consciousness and AI, I postulated that consciousness evolves only after organisms have idle time:

“I have a theory about consciousness being on a spectrum. That itself isn’t anything new but I think the factors that play into consciousness are: Basic needs, computational ‘processing’, and idleness. Consciousness comes from having more processing time than needed to meet basic needs, along with the inability for processing (early thinking) to be idle, and so for lack of a better word desires are created.

Think of a very simple organism when all of its needs are met. This isn’t a real thought process I’m going to share but rather a meta look at this simple organism: “I have enough heat, light, and food, what should I do with myself?”

  • Seek better food
  • Move closer to the heat or light source
  • Try different food
  • Join another organism that can help me
  • Find efficiencies
  • Find easier ways to move
  • Hunt

At first, these are not conscious decisions, they are only a choice of simple processes. But eventually, the desires grow. Think decisions that start like, “If I store more energy I can survive longer in times of famine.” And evolve to more of a desire not just for survival but for pleasure (for lack of a better word): “I like this food more than other kinds and want more of it.” …All stemming from having idle processing/thinking time.”

Well, now Google is giving AI some idle time. They are calling it dream time, but it’s essentially time for metacognition… thinking about what it has learned. See this TikTok by @parthknowsai:

Later on in my post I say,

“Our brains are answer-making machines. We ask a question and it answers, whether we want it to or not. If I say what does a purple elephant with yellow polkadots look like? You will inevitably think of what that looks like simply from reading the question. I think that is what happens at a very fundamental level of consciousness. When all needs are met the processors in the brain don’t suddenly stop and sit idle. Instead, the questions arise, “How do I get more food?”, “Where would be better for me to move to?” Eventually all needs are met, but the questions keep coming. At first based on simple desires, but more and more complex over generations and eons of time.

So why did I title this, ‘Consciousness and AI’? I think one of the missing ingredients in developing Artificial General (or Super) intelligence is that we are just giving AI’s tasks to complete and process at faster and faster times, and when the processing of these tasks are completed, the AI sits idle. An AI has no built in desire that an organic organism has to use that idle time to ask questions, to want something beyond completing the ‘basic needs’ tasks it is asked to do.

If we figure out a way to make AI curious, to have it desire to learn more, and to not let itself be idle, at that point it will be a very short path to AI being a lot smarter than us.”

And I  conclude:

“If it’s idle time and desires that bring about sentience, then figuring out how to make AI’s naturally curious will be the path to artificial general intelligence… Because they are already at a place where they have unused processing time, which is continuing to grow exponentially fast.”

If my prediction is correct, this sleep/dreaming/processing/distilling, (ultimately ‘free questioning’), time is going to accelerate the true intelligence of AI. And so we are going to see at the very least general, if not super intelligent, artificial intelligence much sooner than might be expected or predicted.

Death of the App?

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When AI allows anyone and everyone to create an APP for your phone when will people start to realize that no one wants 8 pages of apps? Do I need an app that is just an interval timer for working out, or will a website do? Do I really need a meditation app or just a playlist? What about (another) podcast, AI, appointment, parking, or fitness app?

Can I just read an article or input my data on a web page designed to work well on a phone, rather than being asked to open an app that I haven’t used in a month, and then having to log into that app before I can use it? Do I have to be asked… every… single… time… if I want to continue on a website or move to the app? Why is the download process necessary? I understand the challenge of not having data, but if I’m using a parking or appointment app, they are going to need data anyway, so the app is just an extra step, not an efficiency.

I think we are going to start to see some very clever websites evolving. At first the app will still be available, but it won’t actually be an app, it will be like a dedicated web browser opening a specific website. So, you’ll still get the icon on your phone if you want it, maybe because it’s easy to find that way, but pretty soon the only apps you’ll want on your phone are ones like banking and email, where security is important. Other than that, I predict a complete shift away from phone apps in the next 5 years… that is, if we are even interested in still carrying a phone with us in 5 years, but that’s a whole other thing to think about.

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Related: Breaking the Fourth Wall (Vibe Coding)

Fiscal year end squeeze

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Globally, we’ve seen jumps in prices in the last year that are unsustainable. It seems like everything in the grocery store is more expensive, and prices seem to continue to creep up. The impact must be felt around the world, and cost rises like this unjustly affect people below and near the poverty line more than they affect anyone else.

Now throw on top of this the loss of a job for the main breadwinner in the family, and the results are devastating. Unfortunately a lot of people are about to lose their jobs.

We are reaching, in the next couple months, the fiscal year end for a lot of large corporations, and two related patterns we’ve seen a lot of recently are going to repeat.

  1. Profits over people
  2. Massive layoffs

Corporations care about pleasing shareholders and maintaining stock value over caring for the people who work for them. This is the ugly side of capitalism. Eliminate thousands of salaries and suddenly the balance sheet proves to be more profitable. Never mind that these are people’s careers and livelihood that are being cut short. And never mind about loyalty to the company.

Cut. Save. Profit. And in a year, repeat.

And we aren’t taking about a few dozen jobs, we are talking about tens and cumulatively hundreds of thousands of jobs worldwide. We are talking about people with mortgages, people losing health care, people who were already living paycheque to paycheque, suddenly jobless. People who thought they were going to be ok, suddenly seeking a job in a challenging market where thousands like them are in the same situation.

Beyond purely meeting shareholder targets, AI and robotics are also taking jobs away. Companies are choosing to use the former salaries of employees to buy chips and memory storage. Manufacturers are replacing employees with robots that don’t take breaks or sick leave, and which don’t need to end their shift after 8 hours. On top of shareholder pressures, there are pressures to eliminate jobs and have the AI Revolution transform the workplace more dramatically than the Industrial Revolution did.

I think this year we are going to see this happen at an alarming scale. The irony is, the large scale layoffs that I see about to happen, added to soaring prices, are going to drastically affect the spending of consumers who buy the products these large companies need purchased. However, many of these billion dollar companies are circumventing this too, by committing billions of dollars to purchase goods and services from each other, again inflating their perceived profits for shareholders.

All this to say that I see a lot of short term financial pain for a significant number of people in the coming months. I’m predicting the fiscal year end squeeze is going to be a hardship like none we’ve seen before, and a lot of people, a lot of families, are going to struggle as a result.

Not emergence but convergence

My post yesterday, ‘Immediate Emergence – Are we ready for this?’ I said, “Think about how fast we are going to see the emergence of intelligent ‘beings’ when we combine the brightest Artificial Intelligence with robotics…” and continued that with, “Within the next decade, you’ll order a robot, have it delivered to you, and out of the box it will be smarter than you, stronger than you, and have more mobility and dexterity than you.”

On the technology front, a new study, ‘Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks’ proposes: “measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months. Extrapolating this trend predicts that, in under five years, we will see AI agents that can independently complete a large fraction of software tasks that currently take humans days or weeks.”

More from the article:

“…by looking at historical data, we see that the length of tasks that state-of-the-art models can complete (with 50% probability) has increased dramatically over the last 6 years.”

“If we plot this on a logarithmic scale, we can see that the length of tasks models can complete is well predicted by an exponential trend, with a doubling time of around 7 months.”

And in conclusion:

“If the trend of the past 6 years continues to the end of this decade, frontier AI systems will be capable of autonomously carrying out month-long projects. This would come with enormous stakes, both in terms of potential benefits and potential risks.”

When I was reflecting on this yesterday, I was thinking about the emergence of new intelligent ‘beings’, and how quickly they will arrive. With information like this, plus the links to robotics improvements I shared, I’m feeling very confident that my prediction of super intelligent robots within the next decade is well within our reach.

But my focus was on these beings ‘emerging suddenly’. Now I’m realizing that we are already seeing dramatic improvements, but we aren’t suddenly going to see these brilliant robots. It’s going to be a fast but not a sudden transformation. We are going to see dumb-like-Siri models first, where we ask a request and it gives us related but useless follow up. For instance, the first time you say, “Get me a coffee,” to your robot butler Jeeves, you might get a bag of grounds delivered to you rather than a cup of coffee made the way you like it… without Jeeves asking you to clarify the task because you wanting a bag of coffee doesn’t make sense.

These relatively smart, yet still dumb AI robots are going to show up before the super intelligent ones do. So this isn’t really about a fast emergence, but rather it’s about convergence. It’s about robotics, AI intelligence, processing speed, and AI’s EQ (not just IQ) all advancing exponentially at the same time… With ‘benefits and potential risks.’

Questions will start to arise as these technologies converge, “How much power do we want to give these super intelligent ‘beings’? Will they have access to all of our conversations in front of them? Will they have purchasing power, access to our email, the ability to make and change our plans for us without asking? Will they help us raise our kids?

Not easy questions to answer, and with the convergence of all these technologies at once, not a long time to answer these tough questions either.

Immediate Emergence – Are we ready for this?

I have two daughters, both very bright, both with a lot of common sense. They work hard and have demonstrated that when they face a challenge they can both think critically and also be smart enough to ask for advice rather than make poor decisions… and like every other human being, they started out as needy blobs that 100% relied on their parents for everything. They couldn’t feed themselves or take care of themselves in any way, shape, or form. Their development took years.

Think about how fast we are going to see the emergence of intelligent ‘beings’ when we combine the brightest Artificial Intelligence with robotics like this and this. Within the next decade, you’ll order a robot, have it delivered to you, and out of the box it will be smarter than you, stronger than you, and have more mobility and dexterity than you.

Are we ready for this?

We aren’t developing progressively smarter children, we are building machines that can outthink and outperform us in many aspects.

“But they won’t have the wisdom of experience.”

Actually, we are already working on that, “Microsoft and Swiss startup Inait announced a partnership to develop AI models inspired by mammalian brains… The technology promises a key advantage: unlike conventional AI systems, it’s designed to learn from real experiences rather than just existing data.” Add to this the Nvidia Omniverse where robots can do millions of iterations and practice runs in a virtual environment with real world physics, and these mobile, agile, thinking, intelligent robots are going to be immediately out-of-the-box super beings.

I don’t think we are ready for what’s coming. I think the immediate emergence of super intelligent, agile robots, who can learn, adapt, and both mentality and physically outperform us, that we will see in the next decade, will be so transformative that we will need to rethink everything: work, the economy, politics (and war), and even relationships. This will drastically disrupt the way we live our lives, the way we engage and interact with each other and with these new, intelligent beings. We aren’t building children that will need years of training, we are building the smartest, most agile beings the world has ever seen.

The false AGI threshold

I think a very conservative prediction would be that we will see Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in the next 5 years. In other words, there will be AI agents, working with recursive self-improvement, that will learn how to do new tasks outside the realm of its training, faster than a human could. But when this actually happens will be open for debate.

The reason for this is that there isn’t going to be some magical threshold that AGI suddenly passes, but rather a continuous moving of the bar that defines what AGI is. There will be a working definition of AGI that puts up an artificial threshold, then an AGI model will achieve that definition and experts will admit that this model surpasses that definition, but will still think the model lacks some sufficient skills or expected outputs to truly call it AGI.

And so over the next 5 years or so we will have far more sophisticated AI models, all doing things that today we would define as AGI but will not meet the newest definition. The thing is that these moving goal posts will not be adjusted incrementally but rather exponentially. What that means is that the newer definition of AGI is going to include significantly greater output expectations. Then looking back, we will be hard pressed to say “this model’ was the one or ‘this day’ was the day that we achieved AGI.

Sometime soon there will be an AI model put out into the world that will build its own AI agent that starts a billion dollar company without the aid of a human… but that might happen even before consensus that AGI has been achieved. There will be an AI agent that costs lives or endangers lives with its decisions made in the real world, but that too might happen before consensus that AGI has been achieved.

Because the goal posts will keep moving while the technology is on an exponential curve, we are not going to have a magic threshold day when AGI occurred. Instead, in less than 5 years, well before 2030, we are going to be looking back in amazement wondering when we passed the threshold? But make no mistake, that’s going to happen and we don’t have an on/off switch to stop it when it does. This is both exciting and scary.

A prediction nears reality

Andrew Wilkinson said on X:

“Just watched my 5-year-old son chat with ChatGPT advanced voice mode for over 45 minutes.

It started with a question about how cars were made.

It explained it in a way that he could understand.

He started peppering it with questions.

Then he told it about his teacher, and that he was learning to count.

ChatGPT started quizzing him on counting, and egging him on, making it into a game.

He was laughing and having a blast, and it (obviously) never lost patience with him.

I think this is going to be revolutionary. The essentially free, infinitely patient, super genius teacher that calibrates itself perfectly to your kid’s learning style and pace.

Excited about the future.”

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I remember visiting my uncle back when I was in university. The year was somewhere around 1988-90. So, at least 34 years ago. We were talking about the future and Joe Truss explained to me what learning would be like in the coming age of computers.

He said, (loosely paraphrased, this was a long time ago):

‘In the future we will have virtual teachers that will be able to teach us exactly what we want to know in exactly the format we need to learn best. You want to learn about relativity? How about learning from Einstein himself? You’ll see him in front of you like he is real. And he will not just lecture you, he will react to your questions and even bio-feedback. You look puzzled, he might ask a question. He sees you looking up and to the left, which he knows means you are trying to visualize something, and so he changes his lesson to provide an image. He will be a teacher personalized to any and all of your learning needs.’

We aren’t quite there yet, but the exchange Andrew Wilkinson’s son had with ChatGPT, and the work being done in virtual and augmented reality, suggest that Joe’s prediction is finally coming into being.

I too am excited about the future, and more specifically, the future of learning.

It’s already here!

Just yesterday morning I wrote:

Robots will be smarter, stronger, and faster than humans not after years of programming, but simply after the suggestion that the robot try something new. Where do I think this is going, and how soon will we see it? I think Arther C. Clarke was right… the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

Then last night I found this post by Zain Khan on LinkedIn:

🚨 BREAKING: OpenAI just made intelligent robots a reality

It’s called Figure 01 and it’s built by OpenAI and robotics company Figure:

  • It’s powered by an AI model built by OpenAI
  • It can hear and speak naturally
  • It can understand commands, plan, and carry out physical actions

Watch the video below to see how realistic it’s speech and movement abilities are. The ability to handle objects so delicately is stunning.

Intelligent robots aren’t a decade away. They’re going to be here any day now.

This video, shared in the post, is mind-blowingly impressive!

This is just the beginning… we are moving exponentially fast into a future that is hard to imagine. Last week I would have guessed we were 5-10 years away from this, and it’s already here! Where will we really be with AI robotics 5 years from now?

(Whatever you just guessed is probably laughably conservative.)

The most daring prophecies

In the early 1950’s Arthur C. Clarke said,

“If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run — and often in the short one — the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.”

As humans we don’t understand exponential growth. The well known wheat or rice on a chessboard problem is a perfect example:

If a chessboard were to have wheat placed upon each square such that one grain were placed on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on (doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square), how many grains of wheat would be on the chessboard at the finish?

The answer: 264−1 or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615… which is over 2,000 times the annual world production of wheat.

All this to say that we are ill-prepared to understand how quickly AI and robotics are going to change our world.

1. Robots are being trained to interact with the world through verbal commands. They used to be trained to do specific tasks like ‘find one of a set of items in a bin and pick it up’. While the robot was sorting, it was only sorting specific items it was trained to do. Now, there are robots that sense and interpret the world around them.

“The chatbot can discuss the items it sees—but also manipulate them. When WIRED suggests Chen ask it to grab a piece of fruit, the arm reaches down, gently grasps the apple, and then moves it to another bin nearby.

This hands-on chatbot is a step toward giving robots the kind of general and flexible capabilities exhibited by programs like ChatGPT. There is hope that AI could finally fix the long-standing difficulty of programming robots and having them do more than a narrow set of chores.”

The article goes on to say,

“The model has also shown it can learn to control similar hardware not in its training data. With further training, this might even mean that the same general model could operate a humanoid robot.”

2. Robot learning is becoming more generalized: ‘Eureka! NVIDIA Research Breakthrough Puts New Spin on Robot Learning’.

“A new AI agent developed by NVIDIA Researchthat can teach robots complex skills has trained a robotic hand to perform rapid pen-spinning tricks — for the first time as well as a human can…

Eureka has also taught robots to open drawers and cabinets, toss and catch balls, and manipulate scissors, among other tasks.

The Eureka research, published today, includes a paper and the project’s AI algorithms, which developers can experiment with using NVIDIA Isaac Gym, a physics simulation reference application for reinforcement learning research. Isaac Gym is built on NVIDIA Omniverse, a development platform for building 3D tools and applications based on the OpenUSD framework. Eureka itself is powered by the GPT-4 large language model.”

3. Put these ideas together then fast forward the training exponentially. We have robots that understand what we are asking them, which are trained and positively reinforced in a virtual physics lab. These robots are practicing how to do a new task before actually doing it… not practicing a few times, or even a few thousand times, but actually doing millions of practice simulations in seconds. Just like the chess bots that learned to play chess by playing itself millions of times, we will have robots where we ask them to do a task and they ‘rehearse’ it over and over again in a simulator, then do the task for the first time as if it had already done it perfectly thousands of times.

In our brains, we think about learning a new task as a clunky, slow experience. Learning takes time. When a robot can think and interact in our world while simultaneously rehearsing new tasks millions of times virtually in the blink of an eye, we will see them leap forward in capabilities at a rate that will be hard to comprehend.

Robots will be smarter, stronger, and faster than humans not after years of programming, but simply after the suggestion that the robot try something new. Where do I think this is going, and how soon will we see it? I think Arther C. Clarke was right…

…the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

The future is now

I’ve shared Chat GPT a couple times (1, 2), and I really think that tools like this are going to create a massive shift in jobs, education, and creativity. It can been seen as both scary and exciting.

On another front, scientists have achieved ‘ignition’ in a nuclear fusion test. This is the creation of a fusion reaction where the energy output is greater than the energy input. For over a decade this was an unachievable goal, any reaction created required so much energy to produce that the costs were greater than the returns.

If you showed someone from 1995 the technology we had 25 years later in 2020, they would be impressed and amazed. I’m reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But what I’m seeing right now seems like magic.

I think the leaps in technology and ingenuity that will happen in the next 25 years will so far exceed what we saw happen in the last 25 years that it will feel more like we are 50 years in the future rather than just 25. So, buckle up and get ready for a wild ride into the future… it’s just getting started now!