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the nature of physics brilliance. Boeing 747s lumbering across the Pacific towards
San Francisco for decades faced the sweaty problem of cancelled landings as they
circled above a fogged in airport, fuel running lower. The introduction of
“autolanding” systems in the solved this for good. No big plane diverts from a misty
field; it lands itself. AI offers the possibility of a kind of auto-land for our biggest
physics puzzles, bringing them safely through a fog of data, theory and wrong ideas.
But with this weird price: We may not fully understand why the answers are right.
All around us Al-enabled systems will extend our ability to calculate and learn, to
penetrate all sorts of foggy problems. They will sharpen our sadly dimming
memories, keep us safe and even help us create. Just as those Al-enabled airplanes
already make it impossible for pilots to fly into the ground, so computer wisdom
may protect us from crashes of our own: Too much financial risk. Bad educational
choices. (Poor music suggestions on a first date.) They will rely on their vast,
instantly updated networks to tell us things we can’t see or would never notice in
the first place: Don’t visit that office, everyone’s sick. They will use the ability to
model thousands of possible outcomes of any choice to provide us with
“feedforward” - an ability to learn from the future and not merely the past. Or, they
will know to jam our brain full of the right chemicals at the right time: Here’s a Diplo
track to put you in the mood to go forarun. You really need to exercise, Dave.
Just as an age without connected devices will one day seem strangely antique, so
will a world without the constant touch of AI. Recall Benjamin Franklin’s famous
lament in the 1780s, that he’d sadly been “born too early” to enjoy the fruits of
reason Starting to spill into his world as a result of the Scientific Revolution. Well,
you and I (and scientists like Silk and Ellis) may have been “born too late” for an age
of purely human cognition; the habits of connected thinking already inform our
decisions and mark roads to new knowledge. The inevitability of Al reflects an
inescapable logic at work now: We want faster better and smarter systems. We want
to compress time. But the faster our world gets, the more it slips beyond a pace of
human management. Al steps in. It makes the system function faster. Keeps itself
safe. Us too.?62 Better-than-human Al inside these “representational” grids doesn’t
vanish like it did in Maes’ lab. In fact, an honestly artificial intelligence is their
nature of their strange essence. They will use it not simply to contemplate the
world, to help us along, but also to confront what has never been seen, to see and
then coldly manipulate any topology of power they can reach. Of course we'll still
continue to think about the world; but the world, a wired and alive and cogitating
cage, will think about us too.?63
262 Us too: Heinl, p. 53
263 Of course: Nigel Thrift and Shaun French, “The Automatic Production of Space”,
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 27 309-335 2002
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