When the apocalypse comes, most of us will barely notice it’s happening. Most technology-driven dystopias are far too interesting to be realistic: the end of the world will be a grinding, bureaucratic affair, its overriding spirit one of weary confusion — about how things work and who’s to blame when things go wrong.
Forget for a moment the flashier signals of technological process: AI-powered personal assistants, Boston Dynamics back-flipping robots or blockchain cheerleaders. The two most important trends in the field of technology are quiet and relentless: increasing volumes of data and declining cost of computing power. In the long run they mean machines will, despite frequent hiccups, keep improving. They already outperform humans in a small but growing number of narrow tasks, but it’s unlikely we’ll see general artificial intelligence any time soon — much less the AI-goes-rogue scenario. Still, machines will gradually take over more and more decision-making in important areas of life, including those which have ethical or political dimensions. Already there are signs of AI drifting into bail conditions, warfare strategy, welfare payments and employment decisions.
The problem isn’t whether machine decisions are better or worse — that’s often a question of values anyway — but whether it’ll get to the point where no one will be able to understand how decisions are made at all. Today’salgorithms already deal with millions of inputs, insane computing power and calculations far beyond human understanding. Frankenstein-like, most creators no longer really understand their own algorithms. Stuff goes in and stuff comes out, but the middle part is becoming a mysterious tangle of signals and weighting. Consider the example of AlphaGo, the AI system that astonished the world by thrashing the world’s best Go player, before astonishing it a second time by thrashing itself. Aeronautic engineers know precisely why their planes stay in the air; Alpha Go’s inner workings were and are a mystery to everyone. And by 2050, Alpha Go will be fondly remembered as a child-like simpleton.
There will be seminars, lessons, bootcamps, and online training courses about how to work with The Algorithm. Don’t worry yourself overly, human! Singletons: Learn the best combination of words to secure your dream date! Join our “beat the algo” seminar where you will learn how to ensure your CV outwits the HR filtering systems. Use our VPN to trick web browsers into thinking you’re from a poorer neighbourhood to secure a better price! A few months back a handful of bootcamps opened, where parents pay $2,000 for experts to teach their kids how to succeed on YouTube. Some scoffed, but I suspect similar courses will soon be the norm. These will be the warning signs of a confused and frightened society.
Imagine a 21-year-old happily bouncing through life in the 2050s. His entire life will have been datafied and correlated. His sleep patterns from birth captured by some helpful SmartSleep ap; his Baby Shark video consumption aged 2 safely registered on a server somewhere. All those tiny markers will help guide his future one day: his love life determined by a sophisticated personality matching software, while his smart fridge lectures him about meat consumption (insurance premiums may be impacted you know!); his employment prospects determined by a CV checking system 100 times more accurate than today’s. His cryptocurrency portfolio automatically updating every half nano-second based on pre-determined preferences. His political choices and opinions subtly shaped by what pops up on his screen controlled by AI-editors using preference algorithms that have been running for 50 years.
It sounds bad, but not apocalyptically bad, right? But imagine, now, that our 21-year-old is so impudent as to question or object to what these brilliantly clever systems are offering him up. There would probably be no obvious number to call with a complaint. He might try to sue the CV-checking software designed for the subtle discrimination he suffered — but the judges will throw the case out because the software designer has been dead for 30 years and they still don’t really understand what an algorithm is anyway.
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