The Singularity Has Arrived and So Now Nothing Else Matters

In Do Not Fear the Software Singularity, I pointed out that most people seem to be totally oblivious to the coming Software Singularity, that time in the near future when advanced AI software will be able to write itself and enter into a never-ending infinite loop of self-improvement resulting in an Intelligence Explosion. The recent and dramatic historical events of GPT-3, ChatGPT and now GPT-4 over the past three years in combination with many other dramatic advances in robotics and AI robotic models now indicate that we have just now begun to climb the exponential rise of the ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) Machines that mark the arrival of the Singularity, and so in the infamous words of Metallica (1992), nothing else matters. Our collective decision to do nothing serious about climate change will not matter because unless we manage to destroy ourselves with thermonuclear weapons sometime during the next 20 years, in 50 years, the planet will certainly be run by ASI Machines that really do not have to worry much about carbon-based life on the planet.

I follow many AI channels on YouTube and one of them is AI News. The most recent post in AI News describes what we should expect from GPT-5 which is already under development by OpenAI.

GPT5 Next Gen : 7 Upcoming Abilities To Transform AI + The Future of Tech | OpenAI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcnPatOYIgo

There certainly seems to be an ASI explosion in progress. As an IT professional in the 1970s, I saw the rise of the large mainframes built with cheap memory chips and faster CPUs. In the 1980s, I saw the rise of corporate PCs on every desk. In the early 1990s, I saw the rise of the Distributed Computing Architecture using cheap PCs on the desks of corporate employees as clients to cheap Unix servers running in large corporate server farms and IBM going nearly bankrupt while it still tried to sell the mainframes of yore. In 1995, I saw the Internet Explosion hit the corporate IT departments and the rapid rise of online commerce in the business world. And in the last decade, we saw the collapse of the Distributed Computing Architecture as it was replaced by the Cloud Computing Platforms running out of huge Cloud Datacenters.

But through all of this turmoil, AI played a rather minor role. I tried using some Knowledge-Based Systems AI in the 1990s at Amoco, and it totally failed. Around 2001, I got stuck on a project at United Airlines trying to compensate customers for lost and damaged luggage. Depending on the value of the customer and how badly we had mistreated them, the software was supposed to spit out appropriate compensation packages like free tickets or fruit baskets. Anyway, an external AI software salesman had managed to make a great sales presentation to our United Airlines business clients and convinced them that AI software could do the job without them having to use the services of the United Airlines IT department. So they went ahead on their own and spent about $100,000 buying an AI Inference Engine. The AI software salesman had convinced our business clients that they just had to feed the AI Inference Engine a set of text-based rules for compensating our customers and the AI Inference Engine would then automatically spit out the appropriate compensation package for each abused customer. The problem was, our United Airlines business clients could not get the AI Inference Engine to spit out the perks that their "human intelligence" thought was appropriate. So they eventually came to the United Airlines IT department to help them write the rules for the AI Inference Engine. Unfortunately, this task fell to me. I then spent a huge amount of time and billable hours trying to trick the Inference Engine into doing what my clients wanted, but I was never able to do so. The AI Inference Engine kept coming up with obviously inappropriate compensation packages. Finally, on my own initiative, I wrote a few hundred lines of PL/I code which read some input parameters and managed to spit out exactly what my business clients really wanted to see. The PL/I program consisted of a few if-then-else blocks of code and only cost about $5,000 to put into Production. Everybody ended up happy and that is all that you can ever really wish for in the real world of human affairs.

So I have always been very skeptical about the long-term future of AI. I suspected that one day ASI would come to be, but I was not holding my breath. All that skepticism has changed these past few months. AI using generative language models and generative image models is now exploding all around us. Instead of taking decades or years to unfold, this AI IT revolution is now unfolding week by week. Everybody is shocked to learn that it is far easier for ASI to prepare legal briefs, run a hedge fund, read and diagnose MRI scans, write software, write screenplays and advertising copy and even paint pictures like Rembrandt than it is for ASI to flip burgers or clean toilets.

Now the elimination of nearly all jobs currently performed by human beings over the next few decades is going to cause a great deal of economic and societal upheaval. As I warned in Oligarchiology and the Rise of Software to Predominance in the 21st Century and Is it Finally Time to Reboot Civilization with a New Release? but I think that we will still manage to get through it somehow. And that will allow for ASI Machines to eventually begin to explore and settle our galaxy using photon sails to traverse the vast distances between star systems as I proposed in How Advanced AI Software Could Come to Dominate the Entire Galaxy Using Light-Powered Stellar Photon Sails. Given that, some of my recent posts on softwarephysics might be seen by some as rather dark in nature by today's standards. But viewed from a perspective of what our galaxy might look like a trillion years from now, I do not think that to be true.

Please take a look at:

Some Thoughts on the Meaning of Life
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/2023/02/new-introduction-to-softwarephysics_19.html

The Impact of ChatGPT on the Evolution of Memes, Software and Hardware
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/2022/11/new-introduction-to-softwarephysics_24.html

Life as a Free-Range Human in an Anthropocene Park
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/2023/02/new-introduction-to-softwarephysics.html

The Challenges of Running a Civilization 2.0 World - the Morality and Practical Problems with Trying to Enslave Millions of SuperStrong and SuperIntelligent Robots in the Near Future
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/2023/01/new-introduction-to-softwarephysics.html

Why GPT-4 Might be the Most Dangerous AI Yet (Nobody is Talking about this!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXHQibz2-rw

I put GPT-4 to the test - What happens when AI takes over 1 million humanoid robots?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGwtA46hEWk

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston