Tag Archives: technology

Not emergence but convergence

Leave a reply

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?

2 Replies

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.

It’s all happening so fast

Leave a reply

I subscribe to superhuman.ai, a daily email newsletter. Most days I peruse it for about 3-5 minutes before work, primarily focussing on the ‘Today in AI’ section. It’s fascinating to see how the field of AI is rapidly advancing. On weekends the email shifts topics. Saturday is a robotics special and Sundays are focused on scientific and technological breakthroughs outside of AI.

Here are some videos shared in yesterday’s Superhuman robotics focused update:

Then here are 3 sections from today’s email. Two related to technological advances:

Star Power: France just took a massive lead in the race to near-limitless clean energy. The country’s CEA WEST Tokamak reactor has shattered China’s record, maintaining a hydrogen plasma reaction for 22 minutes and 17 seconds flat. While it’s not commercial-ready yet, it’s a major leap in fusion research and has huge implications for the development of ITER, the world’s largest fusion project, in the south of France. 

Two-way Street: Chinese researchers have built the world’s first two-way brain-computer interface (BCI). Unlike conventional BCIs that just decode brain signals, this system creates a feedback loop where both the brain and the machine learn from each other and improve at working together over time.

And 3 related to health and longevity:

Cancer Counter: Scientists at Memorial Sloan Kettering have reported promising results from a small trial that used personalized mRNA vaccines to fight pancreatic cancer. Out of the 16 participants who were administered the vaccine, at least half generated long-lasting cancer-fighting T cells, with early results suggesting fewer recurrences. Researchers estimate these T cells could persist for years, offering hope for a future breakthrough.

Fountain of Youth: Japanese bioengineers claim to have found the ‘rewind’ button for aging. Noticing that older cells were considerably larger in size than younger ones, the scientists discovered that they were packed in a layer of the AP2A1 protein. This led them to conclude that blocking the protein could reverse aging — a potential breakthrough for anti-aging treatments. We’ll believe it when we see it.

Follicle Fix: Research teams around the worldare possibly getting closer to reversing hair loss with a host of innovative new treatments. They’re currently testing a sugar-based gel that could stimulate blood supply to hair follicles, potentially offering a simple, affordable cure for baldness. Also, a new topical gel, PP405, aims to “wake up” dormant hair follicle stem cells, while exosome-based therapies show promise in regrowing hair naturally.

Two years ago, I would have said we were 15-20 years away from intelligent robots living among us, now I think wealthy people will have these in the houses before the end of the year, and they will become even more affordable and mainstream before the end of 2026.

Two years ago I actually believed and shared that my kids would be the first generation to routinely live past 100 years old, barring accidents and rare diagnoses that haven’t yet been cured. Now I can actually conceive of this being true for my generation.

I thought Universal Basic Income was going to be a thing in the 2040’s or 2050’s… Now I look at how intelligent LLM’s are, and how advance robots are, and I wonder how we’ll make it through the 2020’s without needing to financially support both white collar and blue collar workers who are pushed out of jobs by AI and robots.

The speed of innovation is accelerating and right now we are just scratching the surface of AI inspired innovation. What happens when an AI with the equivalent knowledge of 100,000 plus of our most intelligent humans starts to make intuitive connections between entire bodies of knowledge from science, technology, politics, economics, culture, nature, and even art?

In 1985 the movie Back to the Future took us forward to 2015 where there were hovering skate boards. In 40 years rather than 30 we haven’t gotten there yet. But look at the progress in robotics from 2015-2025. This is going to advance exponentially from 2025 to 2030.

If the Back to the Future movie were made today, and the future Marty McFly went to was 2055, I bet the advancements of our imagination would be underwhelming compared to what would actually be possible. While I don’t think we will be there yet with space travel and things like a Mars space station, I think the innovations here on earth will far exceed what we can think of right now.

It’s all happening so fast!

Speed and collar colour

Leave a reply

Two things are happening simultaneously.

First, the advancements we see in AI are moving at an exponential rate. Humans don’t really understand how to look at exponential growth because everything in front of them moves faster than what they’ve already experienced.

How many years did it take from the time light bulbs were invented until they were in most houses? I don’t know, but it took a long while. Chat GPT was used by over 100 million people in less than 2 months. And the ability of tools like this are increasing in ability exponentially as well. It’s like we’ve gone warp speed from tungsten and incandescent lights to LED’s in a matter of months rather than years and years.

The other thing happening right now is that for the first time at scale, it’s white collar, not blue collar jobs that are being threatened. Accountants, writers, analysts, coders, are all looking over their shoulder wondering when AI will make most of their jobs redundant. Meanwhile, we are many years away from a robot trying to figure out and repair a bathroom or ceiling leak. Sure, there will be some new tools to help, but I don’t think a plumbing home repair person is something AI is threatening to replace any time soon.

These two things happening so quickly are going to change the future value in careers. Whole sectors will be reinvented. New sectors will emerge. But where does that leave the 20-year accountant in a large firm that finds it can cut staffing by 2/3rds? What careers are not going to be worth going to university for 4+ years for? The safest jobs right now are the trades, and while they too will be challenged as we get AI into autonomous humanoid robots, the immediate threat seen in white collar jobs are not the same for blue collar professions (as opposed to blue collar factory workers, who are equally threatened by exponential changes).

These changes are single-digit years as opposed to decades away… and I’m not sure we are ready to handle the speed at which these changes are coming?

Don’t believe the hype

Leave a reply

The open source DeepSeek AI model has been built my the Chinese for a few million dollars, and it seems this model works better than the multi-billion dollar paid version of Chat GPT (at about 1/20th the operating cost). If you watch the news hype, it’s all about how Nvidia and other tech companies have taken a huge financial hit as investors realize that they don’t ‘need’ the massive computing power they thought they did. However, to put this ‘massive hit’ into perspective let’s look at the biggest stock market loser yesterday, Nvidia.

Nvidia has lost 13.5% in the last month, most of which was lost yesterday.

However, if you zoom out and look at Nvidia’s stock price for the last year, they are still up 89.58%!

That’s right, this ‘devastating loss’ is actually a blip when you consider how much the stock has gone up in the last year, even when you include yesterday’s price ‘dive’. If you bought $1,000 of Nvidia stock a year ago, that stock would be worth $1,895.80 today.

Beyond that, the hype is that Nvidia won’t get the big orders they thought they would get, if an open source LLM (Large Language Model) is going to make efficient, affordable access to very intelligent AI, without the need for excessive computing power. But this market is so new, and there is so much growth potential. The cost of the technology is going down and luckily for Nvidia, they produce such superior chips that even if there is a slow down in demand, the demand will still be higher than their supply will allow.

I’m excited to try DeepSeek (I’ve tried signing up a few times but can’t get access yet). I’m excited that an open source model is doing so well, and want to see how it performs. I believe the hype that this model is both very good and affordable. But I don’t believe the hype that this is some sort of game-changing wake up call for the industry.

We are still moving towards AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, and ASI – Super Intelligence. Computing power will still be in high demand. Every robot being built now, and for decades to come, will need high powered chips to operate. DeepSeek has provided an opportunity for a small market correction but it’s not an innovation that will upturn the industry. This ‘devastating’ stock price losses the media is talking about is going to be an almost unnoticeable blip in stock prices when you look at the tech stock prices a year or 5 years from now.

It is easy to get lost in the hype, but zoom out and there will be hundreds of both little and big innovations that will cause fluctuations in stock market prices. This isn’t some major market correction. It’s not the downfall of companies like Nvidia and Open AI. Instead, it’s a blip in a fast-moving field that will see some amazing, and exciting, technological advances in the years to come… and that’s not just hype.

The false AGI threshold

Leave a reply

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.

Dial tone

Leave a reply

When was the last time you heard a dial tone? When was the last time you used a rotary phone? Or a pay phone?

I tend to use Siri a lot. I don’t go to my phone app, I just ask Siri to call the number for me. And I call people a lot less than I text them.

We’ve come a long way from a family phone being connected to our wall, with a long cord attached to the handset. We’ve moved the phone from a side character to the protagonist. From an item to occasionally connect to one person to a tool of constant contact to the world.

Along the way, the idea of the dial tone disappeared. What else has disappeared?

In the middle

Leave a reply

I think that a robust and healthy middle class is essential to maintain a vibrant society. But what I see in the world is an increasing gap between the wealthy and an ever larger group of people living in debt and/or from paycheque to paycheque. The (not so) middle class now might still go on a family vacation, and spend money on restaurants, but they are not saving money for the future… they simply can’t do what the middle class of the past did.

A mortgage isn’t to be paid off, it’s something to continue to manage during retirement. Downsizing isn’t a choice to be made, it’s a survival necessity. Working part time during retirement isn’t a way to keep busy, it’s s necessity to make ends meet.

I grew up in a world where I believed I would do better than my parents did. Kids today doubt they will ever own a place like their parents, and many don’t believe they’ll ever own a house. Renting and perhaps owning a small condo one day are all they aspire to. Not because they don’t want more, but because more seems too costly and out of reach.

Then I see the world of AI and robotics we are heading into and I wonder if initially things won’t get worse before they get better? Why hire a dozen programmers, just hire two exceptional ones and they are the quality control for AI agents write most of your code. Why hire a team of writers when one talented writer can edit the writing done by AI? Why hire factory workers that need lunch breaks and are more susceptible to making errors than a team of robots? While some jobs are likely to stick around for a while like trades, childcare, and people in certain medical fields, other jobs will diminish and even disappear.

I don’t think a robot is going to wanted to provide a pregnancy ultrasound any time soon, but AI will analyze that ultrasound better than any human professional. A robot might assist in laying electrical wire at a construction site, but it will still be a human serving you when you can’t figure out most electrical issues that you have in your home. It will still be a human who you call to figure out how to fix your leaky roof or toilet; a human who repairs your broken dishwasher or dryer. These jobs are safe for a while.

But I won’t want my next doctor to be diagnosing me without the aid and assistance of AI. And I would prefer AI to analyze my medical data. I will also prefer the more affordable products created by AI manufacturing. The list goes on and on as I look to where I will both see and want to see AI and robotics aiding me.

And what does this do to the working middle class? How do we tax AI and robots, to help replace the taxation of lost jobs? What do we do about increased unemployment as jobs for (former middle class) humans slowly disappear?

Will we have universal basic income? Will this be enough? What will the middle class look like in 10 or 20 years?

There is no doubt that we are heading into interesting times. The question is, will these disruptions cause upheaval? Will these disruptions widen the wealth gap? Will robotics and AI create more opportunities or more disparity? What will become of our middle class… a class of people necessary to maintain a robust and healthy society?

Promise and Doom

2 Replies

I see both promise and doom in the near future. Current advances in technology are incredible, and we will see amazing new insights and discoveries in the coming years. I’m excited to see what problems AI will solve. I’m thrilled about what’s happening to preserve not just life, but healthy life, as I approach my older years. I look forward to a world where many issues like hunger and disease have ever-improving positive outcomes. And yet, I’m scared.

I also see the end of civilized society. I see the threat of near extinction. I see a world destroyed by the very technologies that hold so much promise. As a case in point, see the article, “‘Unprecedented risk’ to life on Earth: Scientists call for halt on ‘mirror life’ microbe research”.

We are already playing with technology that has the potential to “put humans, animals and plants at risk of lethal infections.” What scares me most is the word I chose to start that sentence with, ‘We’. The proverbial ‘we’ right now are top scientists. But a decade, maybe two decades from now that ‘we’ could include an angry, disenfranchised, and disillusioned 22 year old… using an uncensored AI to intentionally develop (or rather synthetically design) a bacteria or a virus that could spread faster than any plague that humans have ever faced. Not a top researcher, not a university trained scientist, a regular ‘Joe’ who has decided at a young age that the world isn’t giving him what he deserves and decides to be vengeful on an epic scale.

The same thing that excites me about technological advancement also scares me… and it’s the power of individuals to impact our future. We all know the names of some great thinkers: Galileo, Newton, Curie, Tesla, and Einstein as incredible scientists that transformed the way we think of the world. People like them are rare, and have had lasting influence on the way we think of the world. For every one of them there are millions, maybe billions of bright thinkers for whom we know nothing.

I don’t fear the famous scientist, I fear the rogue, unhappy misfit who uses incredible technological advancements for nefarious reasons. The same technology that can make our lives easier, and create tremendous good in the world, can also be used with bad intentions. But there are differences between someone using a revolver for bad reasons and someone using a nuclear bomb for bad reasons. The problem we face in the future is that access to the equivalent harm of a nuclear bomb (or worse) will be something more and more people have access to. I don’t think this is something we can stop, and so as amazing as the technology is that we see today, my fear is that it could also be what leads to our demise as a species.

The cat’s out of the bag

Leave a reply

I find it mind boggling that just 5 years ago the big AI debate was whether we would let AI out in the wild or not? The idea was, AI would be sort of ‘boxed’ and within our ability to ‘contain’… but we have somehow decided to just bypass this question and set AI free.

Here is a trifecta of things that tell me the cat is out of the bag.

  1. NVIDIA puts out the Jetson Orin Nano. A tiny AI that doesn’t need to be connected to the cloud.
  2. Robots like Optimus from Tesla are already being sold.
  3. AI’s are proving that they can self replicate.

That’s it. That’s all. Just extrapolate what you want to from these three ‘independent’ developments. Put them together, stir in 5 years of technological advancement. Add a good dose of open source access and think about what’s possible… and beyond possible to contain.

Exciting, and quite honestly, scary!