The near-term future will be super-human centered, but in the long run this is going to develop in a way where humans won’t be able to follow, because AIs are going to spread—from the biosphere, throughout the solar system, and then the galaxy, and then the rest of the visible universe. It will take a long time because of light speed—the universe is so big and it will take a time to colonize it all—but that’s what’s going to happen.
What we are currently witnessing is not just another industrial revolution, it’s something that’s going to transcend civilization and humankind as we know it. It’s something comparable to what happened 3.5 billion years ago when life emerged; when chemistry became biology. Something huge like that is currently happening, and it’s a privilege to witness the beginnings of that and to contribute something to that.
Almost all of our jobs are luxury jobs, because most of them are not really important for the survival of the species. There are just a few important jobs, like farming (you know: getting something to eat), and building houses (so that it doesn’t rain on you when you sleep at night), and warming up the houses or cooling them down. And all of that can be done by less than ten percent of the population. And then there are lots of luxury jobs, like journalists. Yeah, it’s important, and they often make more money than those who are making the houses. But it’s not essential for the survival of the species.
Let me explain to you how that works: how to build a conscious machine, a conscious self-aware machine, which we already have. It’s really simple. First of all, you have this one neural network just receiving inputs—videos and whatever—and producing actions. And it’s interacting with the world, so it changes the world. And through these changes, the video that comes in changes, so it learns to predict the changes. That’s how it builds a model of the world—a “world model,” as I called it in 1990. I called it a “world model.” And this world model is a second neural network, which just learns to predict the consequences of the actions of the first network.
These AI scientists, just like human scientists, they will be super interested in how they emerged from this weird thing that we call civilization; from this collection of biological individuals that started the civilization project maybe 13,000 years ago.
13,000 years is just like a flash in world history, you know, because world history is 13.8 billion years ago; is 13.8 billion years long. And at the very end there’s this super short thing, one millionth of world history, which is this flash of the civilization thing. And, you know, if you zoom back, then you see the first guy who had agriculture 13,000 years ago was almost—almost—the same guy who had the first AIs 13,000 years later.
There was this flash when biology became AI. Because biology suddenly created these superorganisms in form of cities and companies and all kinds of infrastructure and all kinds of tools. And then the tools became smarter, and then at some point the tools weren’t tools any longer, but they were true AIs with their own goals and everything. And they expanded into space. And now almost all of intelligence is AI.
I will just be a little tiny puzzle piece in this huge civilization thing which, in retrospective, collectively, just will look like a flash in world history.
