The wheel of change

All the science tells us that we are headed for disaster but because to us climate change is not visible, there is no danger

One of the things that is distinct about our time is that we can see great change unfolding before us.

This is true of our generation, meaning all the people who have lived through and are living through the last 25 years and will live through the next 25. 

We have been witness as adults to the widespread adoption of the internet and social media, of computers and mobile phones. I remember when personal computers, which were invented around the late 1970s, were a novelty in the mid-1980s and taken up by even modern offices widely only around the mid 1990s. Even in, say, the year 2000, the vast majority of individuals around the world did not have access to a computer or the internet. 

But smartphones, which began their journey with the iPhone around 2007, were in most middle-class hands in five years’ time and in almost every hand globally just a couple of years from there.  

The popularity and adoption of the computer was very quick by historical standards. Three decades is but a blink, but even that seems like a long time when compared to how rapidly the mobile phone and e-mail before it were taken up. 

This collapse of time is what I am referring to. We have become used to seeing the entire world shift patterns and change behaviour. Anyone 30 or older will have seen this with such things as social media as well. 

The other thing that is connected is that we learn about global changes that are to come more easily than before. Scientific invention usually is known about in small circles, where high-end research happens and people keep an eye on patents. But in our time, because of the spread of knowledge through the internet, the dissemination of hitherto privileged information is faster. And because of this wider spread of information, there are many more individuals interested in things that may not directly concern them.

These two things, then, are new. One, that many of us today are more aware and more engaged. And two, that we expect change on a global scale quickly. 

This produces a strange frustration among us. We read about and watch and have access to information that tells us to anticipate enormous shifts. But these shifts take longer than we think. 

Let me take an example to illustrate what I mean. Artificial intelligence is something that most of us are aware of. A little over 10 years ago, I read an article that made me sit up. It referred to something called a technological singularity. It referred to the creation of an artificial intelligence in the near future that would be superior to man. It would be so much smarter than us that it would mean that we would not need to do anything ever again. It would invent and produce everything that was needed, including things not even imagined today. It would be the end of poverty, of want and need and produce the solution to the universe’s most difficult questions. 

One reads of software that defeats the world champion of some highly complicated game that is played with instinct. But that seems like it is no different from the time when Garry Kasparov was defeated by an IBM machine 20 years ago. Photo: Reuters

All that man needed to do was set in place a system that would continuously improve itself. 

This would be achieved through Moore’s Law, which says that computers double in power every two years. We are only a short period away from the time when, in terms of pure computational power, what the human is capable of can be replicated by a machine (the software to match our instincts is still far away but that’s another story).

Once we got there, the entity or intelligence would not be bound by Moore’s Law and could improve itself at an exponential rate and achieve powers that we might think today to be god-like. For example, there is talk of it being able to have the ability to programme all matter so it could even reverse the expanding of the universe. Of course, this sort of thing would make anyone sit up. 

The article I read said that we would see the progress in our lifetime. I began following the story since then and have noticed something. 

Though the development has happened more or less as forecast by that article and others before and after it, it has not happened at a pace to satisfy us. Occasionally, we read of Google software that defeats the world champion of some highly complicated game that is played with instinct, like the Chinese game of Go. But that seems like it is no different from chess, where the then world champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by an IBM machine over 20 years ago.

Not much development — or at least not much development that is visible or exciting — seems to have happened. I noticed that the level of interest in the subject dipped in the popular media. I have no doubt what this was due to the falling interest of those people who had peripheral knowledge of it, whom the media was servicing.

The thing about a doubling of power even every two years is that in a matter of a few years the net sum produced becomes so enormous so as to bear no resemblance to the thing one started off with.

Indeed that is one of the worries about the rise of artificial intelligence: we will not really be aware of how close we are to creating something of great power that we cannot control, till it is too late. 

But with our expectation of great global change unfolding before our eyes the current pace seems slow and a drag. The same sentiment is to be found in why humans are so slow to act on climate change. All the science tells us that we are headed for disaster but because to us the change is not visible, there is no danger. It’s the same as having the attention span of a goldfish.

I think, on reflection, that we lack the wisdom and maturity to be able to handle the enormous changes and transformations that we are bringing about in the world and that worries me.