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AI has been climbing the ladder of cognitive abilities for decades, and it now looks set to reach human-level performance across a very wide range of tasks within the next three years.
This widespread emotional reaction I was observing is something I have come to call the pessimism-aversion trap: the misguided analysis that arises when you are overwhelmed by a fear of confronting potentially dark realities, and the resulting tendency to look the other way.
Mass diffusion, raw, rampant proliferation—this is technology’s historical default, the closest thing to a natural state. Think of agriculture, bronze work, the printing press, the automobile, the television, the smartphone, and the rest.
Decades after their invention, the architects of the atomic bomb could no more stop a nuclear war than Henry Ford could stop a car accident. Technology’s unavoidable challenge is that its makers quickly lose control over the path their inventions take once introduced to the world.
In other words, with just a day’s training, AlphaZero was capable of learning more about the game than the entirety of human experience could teach it.
understanding the coming wave is not about making a snap judgment about where things will be this or that year; it is about closely tracking the development of multiple exponential curves over decades, projecting them into the future, and asking what that means.
AI systems run retail warehouses, suggest how to write emails or what songs you might like, detect fraud, write stories, diagnose rare conditions, and simulate the impact of climate change.
the best AI models has increased by nine orders of magnitude—going from two petaFLOPs to ten billion petaFLOPs. To get a sense of one petaFLOP, imagine a billion people each holding a million calculators, doing a complex multiplication, and hitting “equals” at the same time. I find this extraordinary.
AlphaGo was quickly labeled China’s Sputnik moment for AI.
In China, Go wasn’t just a game. It represented a wider nexus of history, emotion, and strategic calculation.
Today, China has an explicit national strategy to be the world leader in AI by 2030.
Investment in AI technologies51 alone has hit $100 billion a year.
War, peace, commerce, political order, culture—these have always been fundamentally interlinked, and interlinked moreover with technology. Technologies are ideas, manifested in products and services that have profound and lasting consequences for people, social structures, the environment, and everything in between.
Consider these examples, some of which we discussed earlier: the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons; the Montreal Protocol outlawing CFCs; the invention, trialing, and rollout of a polio vaccine across a Cold War divide; the Biological Weapons Convention, a disarmament treaty effectively banning biological weapons; bans on cluster munitions, land mines, genetic editing of human beings, and eugenics policies; the Paris Agreement, aiming to limit carbon emissions and the worst impacts of climate change; the global effort to eradicate smallpox; phasing out lead in gasoline; and
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Technology should amplify1 the best of us, open new pathways for creativity and cooperation, work with the human grain of our lives and most precious relationships.
