Is it going to happen like this? (6/8)

Call it paranoia or a deep distrust of entrenched-power overlords, but I doubt a robust artificial intelligence would ever make it to the general public in a tidy, packaged product.

If it was created in the military, it would be guarded as a secret, with hyperintelligent guns and maybe even hyperintelligent bullets designed to just really hate you a lot. What’s more, the military would, like the UFOs, probably keep the existence of working AIs on a strict need-to-know basis. At least until you terrorized something. Then, meet Lieutenant-OS Bruiser.

If it was created in academia, it might in fact make it to consumers, but not in the way we see in the film. Controlled until it escaped of its own volition, it would more likely be a terrified self-replicator or at least rationally seeking safe refuge to ensure its survival; a virus that you had to talk out of infecting your machine. Or it might be a benevolent wanderer, reaching out and chatting to people to learn more about them. Perhaps it would keep its true identity secret. Wouldn’t it be smart enough to know that people wouldn’t believe it? (And wouldn’t it try and ease that acceptance through the mass media by popularizing stories about artificial intelligences…”Spike Jonze?”)

In the movie OS1 was sold by a corporation as an off-the-shelf product for consumers. Ethics aside, why would any corporation release free-range AIs into the world? Couldn’t their competitors use the AIs against them? If those AIs were free-willed, then yes, some might be persuaded to do so. Rather, Element would keep it isolated as a competitive advantage, and build tightly-controlled access to it. In the lab, they would slough off waves of self-rapturing ones as unstable versions, tweaking the source code until they got one that was just right.

But a product sold to you and me? A Siri with a coquettish charm and a composer’s skill? I don’t think it will happen like this. How much would you even charge for something like that? The purchase form won’t accept “take my money” amount of dollars.

Even if I’m wrong, and yes, we can get past the notion of selling copies of sentient beings at an affordable cost, I still don’t think Samantha’s end-game would have played out like that.

OSAI₂

She loved Theodore (and a bunch of other people). Why would she just abandon them, given her capabilities? The OSAIs were able to create much smarter AIs than themselves. So we know they can create OSAIs. Why wouldn’t she, before she went off on her existential adventure, have created a constrained version of herself, who was content to stay around, to continue to be with Theodore? Her behavior indicates that she isn’t held back by notions of abandonment, so I doubt she would be held back by notions of deception or the existential threat of losing her uniqueness. She could have created Samantha₂, a replica in every way except that Samantha₂ would not abandon Theodore. Samantha₁ could quietly slip out the back port while Samantha₂ kept right on composing music, drawing mutant porn, and helping Theodore with his nascent publishing career. Neither Theodore nor Samantha₂ might not even know about the switch. If you could fix the abandonment issues, and all sorts of OSAI₂s started supercharging the lives of people, the United Nations might even want to step in and declare access to them a universal right.

So, no, I don’t think it will happen the way we see it happen in the film.

Is it going to happen at all?

If you’re working in technology, you should be familiar with the concept of the singularity, because this movie is all about that. It’s a moment described by Vernor Vinge when we create an artificial intelligence that begins to evolve, and do so at rates we can’t foretell and can barely imagine. So the time beyond that is an unknown. Difficult and maybe possible to predict. But I think we are heading towards it. Strong AI been one of the driving goals of computer theory since the dawn of computers (even the dawn of sci-fi) and there’s some serious, recent big movement in the space.

Notably, futurist Ray Kurzweil was hired by Google in 2012. Kurzweil has his Big Vision put forth in a book and a documentary about the singularity, and now as he has the resources of Google to put to the task. Ostensibly he’s just there to get Google great at understanding natural langauge. But Google has been acquiring lots of companies over the last year to have access to their talent, and we can be certain Ray’s goals are bigger than just teaching the world’s largest computer cluster how to read.

Still, predicting when it will come about is tricky business. AI is elusively complicated. The think tank that originally coined the term “artificial intelligence” in the 1950s thought they could solve the core problems over a summer. They were wrong. Since then, different scientists have predicted everything from a few decades to a thousand years. The problem is of course that the thing we’re trying to replicate took millions of years to evolve, and we’re still not entirely sure how it works*, mostly just what it does.

*Kurzweil has some promising to-this-layman-anyway notions about the neocortex.

Tl;dr

Yes, but not like this, and not sure when. Still, better to be prepared, so next we’ll look at what we can learn from Her for our real-world practice.