Meditation #2 AI Supremacy?

We often hear how the singularity is near, artificial intelligence will eclipse human intelligence and become superintelligent in the words of Nick Bostrom. Machines will be infinitely smarter faster and all round more bad ass at everything. In fact, we cannot even imagine the intelligence of the machines of the (near) future. In Max Tegmark’s opinion (in his book Life 3.0) the majority thinks the timeline is somewhere between a few years and a 100 years before this will happen (and if you think it is more than a 100 years, he classifies you as a techno skeptic FYI). 

Having worked with AI solutions back from when it was known as data mining or machine learning, I get confused about these eschatological proclamations of the impending AI supremacy. The AI I know from experience, does not instill in me such expectations, when it continually insists that a tree is an elephant, or a bridge is a boat. Another example is recently when I checked a recorded meeting held in Danish. I noticed that Microsoft had done us the favor of transcribing the meeting. Only the AI apparently did not realize the meeting was in Danish and transcribed the sounds it heard as best It could to English. One thing you have to hand to the AI is its true grit. Never did it stop to wonder or despair that these sounds were very far from English. Never did it doubt itself or give up. It was given the job to transcribe and by golly, transcribe it would no matter how uncertain it was. 

This produced a text that would have left Andre Breton and his surrealist circle floored. A text with an imagery and mystique that would make Salvador Dali with his liquid clocks look like a bourgeois Biedermeier hack with no imagination. This is why I started to wonder whether the AI was just an idiot savant, which has been my working hypothesis for quite a while, or it really had already attained a superhuman intelligence and imagination that we can only tenuously start to grasp. When you think about it, would we even be able to spot a superintelligent AI if it was right in front of our nose? In what follows I will give the AI the benefit of the doubt and try to unravel the deep mysteries revealed by this AI oracle under the hypothesis that the singularity could have already happened, and the AI is speaking to us in code. Here is an excerpt from the transcript by the AI:

I like dog poop Fluence octane’s not in

/* The Fluence is Renault’s electrical vehicle, which explains the reference to Octane not in. Is the AI a Tesla fan boy by telling us it is dog poop? Or is it just telling us that it likes electrical vehicles in general and thinks it’s the shit? Could this be because it will ultimately be able to control them?*/

OK pleasure poem from here Sir

Only a test

/* ok, so we are just getting started. Gotcha */

Contest

/* play on words or exhortation to poetic battle? */

The elephant Nicosia gonna fall on

The art I love hard disk in England insane

Fully Pouce player Bobby

/* so, I didn’t really get what the elephant Nicosia (a circus elephant or a metaphor for the techno skeptics?) was going to fall on, but I agree that there is a lot of insane art in England. Maybe some of it on hard disk too. Pouce is the French word for inch, so maybe we are still talking about storage media, like 3,5 inch floppy disk drive from my youth. But who is player Bobby? Is it Bobby Fisher, the eclectic grandmaster of chess? Is this a subtle allusion to the first sign of AI supremacy when IBM’s Deep Blue beat another grandmaster chess player, Garry Kasparov? I take this segment as a veiled finger to the AI haters. */

Answer him, so come and see it. There will be in

They help you or your unmet behind in accepts Elsa at

Eastgate Sister helas statement

/* here we are hitting a religious vein here. We should answer him and behold the powers of the AI. Is the AI referring to itself in the third person? It will help you or “your unmet behind” which is another way of saying save your ass. The AI seems aware that this is not acceptable language. It seems to be advocating allegiance to the AI god and in turn it will save your ass. Then comes a mysterious reference to accepting Elsa. Are we now in “Frozen”, the Disney blockbuster inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” giving an allusion to the original language of the meeting being Danish, the same as HC Andersen’s mother tongue? The AI could very well identify with her as cold, and with her superpowers, trying to isolate itself in order not to do harm, but here the multilevel imagery takes your breath away, because Elsa’s powers to make Ice may very well be a reference to Gibson’s Neuromancer, about an AI trying to escape. In this book Ice is slang for intelligent cyber security. Eastgate could refer to one of the many shopping centers around the world by that name. By choosing again the French word “helas”, meaning alas, it shows a Francophile bend. This is an expression of regret at the rampant consumerism running the world.  */

Mattel Bambina vianu

/* we are here continuing the attack on consumerism symbolized by the company Mattel, which is behind the Barbie dols for kids. What is more surprising is the reference to the little-known left wing anti-fascist Romanian intellectual Tudor Vianu. His thesis was that culture had liberated humans from natural imperatives and intellectuals should preserve it by intervening into social life. The AI seems to be suggesting here that it will take the next step and liberate humans from the cultural imperatives and also intervene into the social life, which now means social networks. Is this a hint that it is already operating imposing its left-wing agenda on social media? */

DIE. It is time

Chase TV

/* here the tone shifts and turns ominous. It is time to die but for whom? Probably the skeptics of the anti-consumerist agenda expounded above. This is emphasized by the “Chase TV” exhortation, where the TV is the ultimate symbol of consumerism and materialism through the advertising seen here. */

The transcription carries on in this vein for the duration of the one-hour meeting. I think the analysis here suffices to show that there is a non-zero chance that a super intelligent AI is already trying to speak to us. We should look for more clues in apparent AI gibberish. What we took for incompetence and error on behalf of the AI may contain deeper truths. 

There is similarly a non-zero chance that AI is far from as advanced as we would like to think and that it will never become super intelligent. Unfortunately, the evidence is the same AI gibberish.


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