The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 1. PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.)Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what’s happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future. So I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and once I did that, I wanted to make sure I wrote a post that really explained this whole situation and why it matters so much. Not shockingly, that became outrageously long, so I broke it into two parts.

This is Part 1—Part 2 is here. We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. Vernor Vinge. What does it feel like to stand here? It seems like a pretty intense place to be standing—but then you have to remember something about what it’s like to stand on a time graph: you can’t see what’s to your right. So here’s how it actually feels to stand there: Which probably feels pretty normal…_______________The Far Future—Coming Soon.

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Imagine taking a time machine back to 1. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2. It’s impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,0. This is all before you show him the internet or explain things like the International Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider, nuclear weapons, or general relativity.

1. Part 1 of 2: "The Road to Superintelligence". Artificial Intelligence — the topic everyone in the world should be talking about.
2. Swedish director Ruben Ostlund won Palme d'Or for this "slapstick tragedy about the fragility of everything we call human".
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4. Harrison Ford was born on July 13, 1942 in Chicago, Illinois, to Dorothy (Nidelman), a radio actress, and Christopher Ford (born John William Ford).

This experience for him wouldn’t be surprising or shocking or even mind- blowing—those words aren’t big enough. He might actually die.

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But here’s the interesting thing—if he then went back to 1. And the 1. 50. 0 guy would be shocked by a lot of things—but he wouldn’t die. It would be far less of an insane experience for him, because while 1. The 1. 50. 0 guy would learn some mind- bending shit about space and physics, he’d be impressed with how committed Europe turned out to be with that new imperialism fad, and he’d have to do some major revisions of his world map conception. But watching everyday life go by in 1. No, in order for the 1.

BC, before the First Agricultural Revolution gave rise to the first cities and to the concept of civilization. Watch Quantum Apocalypse Online Hulu. If someone from a purely hunter- gatherer world—from a time when humans were, more or less, just another animal species—saw the vast human empires of 1. And then what if, after dying, he got jealous and wanted to do the same thing. If he went back 1. BC and got a guy and brought him to 1. BC, he’d show the guy everything and the guy would be like, “Okay what’s your point who cares.” For the 1. BC guy to have the same fun, he’d have to go back over 1.

In order for someone to be transported into the future and die from the level of shock they’d experience, they have to go enough years ahead that a “die level of progress,” or a Die Progress Unit (DPU) has been achieved. So a DPU took over 1. Agricultural Revolution rate, it only took about 1. The post- Industrial Revolution world has moved so quickly that a 1. DPU to have happened. This pattern—human progress moving quicker and quicker as time goes on—is what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls human history’s Law of Accelerating Returns. This happens because more advanced societies have the ability to progress at a faster rate than less advanced societies—because they’re more advanced.

This works on smaller scales too. The movie Back to the Future came out in 1. In the movie, when Michael J. Fox went back to 1. TVs, the prices of soda, the lack of love for shrill electric guitar, and the variation in slang. It was a different world, yes—but if the movie were made today and the past took place in 1. The character would be in a time before personal computers, internet, or cell phones—today’s Marty Mc.

Fly, a teenager born in the late 9. Marty Mc. Fly was in 1.

This is for the same reason we just discussed—the Law of Accelerating Returns. The average rate of advancement between 1. So—advances are getting bigger and bigger and happening more and more quickly.

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This suggests some pretty intense things about our future, right? Kurzweil suggests that the progress of the entire 2. He believes another 2.

A couple decades later, he believes a 2. All in all, because of the Law of Accelerating Returns, Kurzweil believes that the 2. If Kurzweil and others who agree with him are correct, then we may be as blown away by 2.

DPU might only take a couple decades—and the world in 2. This isn’t science fiction.

It’s what many scientists smarter and more knowledgeable than you or I firmly believe—and if you look at history, it’s what we should logically predict. So then why, when you hear me say something like “the world 3. Cool…. but nahhhhhhh”? Three reasons we’re skeptical of outlandish forecasts of the future: 1) When it comes to history, we think in straight lines.

When we imagine the progress of the next 3. When we think about the extent to which the world will change in the 2. This was the same mistake our 1. It’s most intuitive for us to think linearly, when we should be thinking exponentially.

If someone is being more clever about it, they might predict the advances of the next 3. They’d be more accurate, but still way off. In order to think about the future correctly, you need to imagine things moving at a much faster rate than they’re moving now. The trajectory of very recent history often tells a distorted story. First, even a steep exponential curve seems linear when you only look at a tiny slice of it, the same way if you look at a little segment of a huge circle up close, it looks almost like a straight line. Second, exponential growth isn’t totally smooth and uniform.

Kurzweil explains that progress happens in “S- curves”: An S is created by the wave of progress when a new paradigm sweeps the world. The curve goes through three phases: 1. Slow growth (the early phase of exponential growth)2. Rapid growth (the late, explosive phase of exponential growth)3. A leveling off as the particular paradigm matures.

If you look only at very recent history, the part of the S- curve you’re on at the moment can obscure your perception of how fast things are advancing. The chunk of time between 1. Microsoft, Google, and Facebook into the public consciousness, the birth of social networking, and the introduction of cell phones and then smart phones.

That was Phase 2: the growth spurt part of the S. But 2. 00. 8 to 2. Someone thinking about the future today might examine the last few years to gauge the current rate of advancement, but that’s missing the bigger picture. In fact, a new, huge Phase 2 growth spurt might be brewing right now. Our own experience makes us stubborn old men about the future. We base our ideas about the world on our personal experience, and that experience has ingrained the rate of growth of the recent past in our heads as “the way things happen.” We’re also limited by our imagination, which takes our experience and uses it to conjure future predictions—but often, what we know simply doesn’t give us the tools to think accurately about the future. When we hear a prediction about the future that contradicts our experience- based notion of how things work, our instinct is that the prediction must be naive.

If I tell you, later in this post, that you may live to be 1. That’s stupid—if there’s one thing I know from history, it’s that everybody dies.” And yes, no one in the past has not died. But no one flew airplanes before airplanes were invented either. So while nahhhhh might feel right as you read this post, it’s probably actually wrong. The fact is, if we’re being truly logical and expecting historical patterns to continue, we should conclude that much, much, much more should change in the coming decades than we intuitively expect.