You are no longer the smartest type of thing on Earth The coming of AI means that humanity's destiny is
(mostly) out of our hands.
“He comes like a day that has passed, and night
enters our future with him.” — Charlo Yesterday my pet rabbit bit my finger. It was an
accident; he was trying to bite a towel to move it out of his way, and I
accidentally stuck my hand in his mouth. He is a gentle beast, and would
never bite a human intentionally. Anyway, the bite punctured and lacerated my
left index finger near the front knuckle. I washed it out, put some ointment
and a band-aid on it, and that was that. It occurs to me that if my pet rabbit had instead been a
tiger, I would now be dead. There is a reason most people don’t keep tigers
as pets; they may be fluffy and cute, but they’re big and strong and can easily kill you. Instead, we generally keep
pets who are smaller and weaker than us, allowing us to train them, and if
necessary to physically restrain them, and minimizing the danger to our own
health. Until now, we haven’t had to think about this
principle in the context of intelligence. As long as you or I or anyone we
know has been alive — for all of recorded history, and in fact for much much
longer than that — humankind has been the most intelligent thing on this
planet. At some point in the next couple of years, that will no
longer be true. It arguably is no longer true right now. There is no single
unarguable measure of intelligence — it’s not like distance or time. AI doesn’t think in the same way humans do. But it can get gold medals on the International
Math Olympiad, solve difficult outstanding math problems all on its own, and get A’s in graduate school classes. Most human beings can’t do any of that. Intelligence is as intelligence does. If it helps you
feel unique and special to sit there and tell yourself “AI can’t think!”, then
go ahead. And sure, AI doesn’t think exactly the way you do. It probably
never will, in the same sense that a submarine will never paddle its fins and
an airplane will never flap its wings. But a submarine can go faster than any
fish, and an airplane can fly higher and faster than any bird, so it doesn’t
matter. You can value your own unique human way of thinking all you like —
and I agree, it’s pretty special and cool — but that doesn’t make it more
effective than AI. Right now, there are some cognitive things that humans
still do better than AI, but that will probably not last. The entire might of
the world’s technological innovation system is now being thrown into making
AI better, and there is no sign of a slowdown in progress. One of the main
things AI couldn’t do until recently was to work on a task for a long period
of time. That’s changing fast. AI models are flying up the METR curve,¹ which tries to
measure the length of time they can take to complete a software engineering
task:
Source: Noam Brown This is what’s behind all the “vibe coding” you’re
hearing about. AI agents — basically, a program that keeps applying AI over
and over until a task is complete — are now taking over much of software
engineering. People just tell the AI what kind of software they want, and the
AI pops it out. Human software engineers are still checking the code for
problems, but as the technology improves, the cost of doing this is likely to
become uneconomical; AI-written software will never be perfect, but it’ll be
consistently much better than anything humans could do, and at a tiny
fraction of the price. Vibe coding is taking over fast. Spotify’s co-CEO recently revealed that the company’s best
developers don’t write code anymore. Some journalists from CNBC, with no
coding experience, vibe-coded a clone of the app Monday, and the company’s stock price promptly crashed. Meanwhile, AI is
increasingly writing the next version of itself, and humans may not be in the loop for very much longer. And all of this — ending software engineering as we know
it, acing the hardest math tests, solving unsolved math problems, creating
infinite apps at the touch of a button — is just the beginning. The amount of
resources that the world is preparing to deploy to improve AI, this year and
in the following few years, utterly dwarfs anything that it has deployed so
far:
Source: Bloomberg AI’s abilities scale with the amount of compute applied.² The amount of
compute available this year will be much greater than the amount that’s producing all the
miracles you see now. And then next year’s compute will be far greater than
that. All the while, AI itself will be searching for ways to improve AI
algorithms to better take advantage of increased compute. Other weaknesses of AI — in particular, its lack of
long-term memory and its inability to learn on the fly — will eventually be
solved.³ AI will be able to act on its own for longer and
longer, with less and less human decision-making in the loop. Meanwhile,
massive investment in robotics will give AI more and more direct contact
with, understanding of, and control of the physical world. More and more people are waking up to this reality. An
article by Matt Shumer called “Something Big is Happening” recently went viral. It’s
very simplified and hand-wavey, and Shumer himself is a bit of a huckster, but it gets the point
across. If anything it understates the pace and magnitude of the changes
taking place. I recommend giving it a read, if you haven’t already. But there’s a bigger reality out there that people
outside the tech industry — and even many people within it — don’t seem to
have grasped yet. It isn’t just that AI could take your job, or put millions
of people on welfare, or give us infinite free software, or whatever. It’s
that for the first time in all of recorded history, humans no longer are — or
soon no longer will be — the most intelligent beings on this planet, in any
meaningful functional sense of the word. For the rest of our lives, we’ll all be sleeping next
to a tiger... |
