May 1st, 2024
In a previous essay, I explained why I believe that the acceleration of technological progress insures that civilization must collapse, and that collapse will likely happen sometime in this century. In this essay, I shall present specific examples of this acceleration.
Let's begin with the microcomputer revolution. The first microcomputer, the Altair, hit the market in 1975. It took about 25 years for half of American homes to acquire some kind of personal computer. I got in early, acquiring my first computer in 1977, and then keeping up with new developments quite closely. Yet things moved slowly in the first years.
The next big leap in the computer revolution was the Internet. It was invented in the 1970s, but remained confined to the academic world until about 1990. Even then, not many people used it; in 1993, only about 1% of all the information travelling through two-way telecommunications networks moved over the Internet, but by the year 2000, 51% of all such information travelled over the Internet. Thus, using my 50% criterion for success, the Internet took only about seven years to reach broad acceptance.
The third big leap in the computer revolution was the smartphone. The first of these was the Apple iPhone, released in 2007. Barely 20 months later, Google introduced the Android, which was directly competitive with the iPhone. It took just six years for half of Americans to acquire a smartphone. As of 2024, there are more smartphones in America than people; some people own several smartphones.
The fourth big leap in the computer revolution is the Limited Language Model for AI. It had been under development in academia for a number of years, but the technology was limited by the requirement for a critical mass of input data. This required a considerable investment to assemble; it wasn't until the fall of 2022 that the first truly competent LLM system, ChatGPT, burst upon the scene. It is free to play with, and in just 15 months it acquired 180 million users.
The potential of LLM AI has triggered an explosion of activity. As of January 10, 2024, there were 67,199 startup companies working on products utilizing this technology. The range of applications is staggering; here is a list of some of the most significant applications of AI:
1. Personalized Shopping
2. AI-Powered Assistants
3. Fraud Prevention
4. Administrative Tasks Automated to Aid Educators
5. Creating Smart Content for Education
6. Voice Assistants
7. Personalized Learning
8. Autonomous Vehicles
9. Spam Filters
10. Facial Recognition
11. Recommendation System
12. Automobile Navigation Systems
13. Robotics for carrying goods inside buildings
14. Cleaning offices and heavy equipment
15. Inventory management
16. Hiring decisions
17. Many diagnostic applications in health care
18. Soil analysis in agriculture
19. Games
20. Moderating social media
21. Targeted marketing
22. Customer service
23. Financial decisions
24. Scientific research
25. Foiling cyberattacks
26. Optimizing logistic operations
27. Traffic management
28. Ride-sharing
29. Manufacturing complex products
30. Optimizing supply chains
31. Quality control
This technology is advancing with astounding speed. Much of what can be written about it now, in May of 2024, will be obsolete within a year.
Now, the significance of this acceleration is the challenge it presents to our social and legal systems. The first of the revolutions, personal computers, presented a small challenge in the effects of videogames on young people. They became addicted to the games, and people worried that first, the violence of the games might have bad effects on the moral development of the children, and second, that children would not get enough exercise and fresh air if they stayed inside playing videogames. Fortunately, we had enough time to develop answers to these problems. Parents learned to place limits on the amount of time that their kids could play videogames. Publishers learned how to make games that were just as much fun, but featured less violence, and to present ratings so that parents could choose appropriate games for their kids.
The second revolution was the Internet, and while it offered a huge range of benefits, some problems came along with the package. The most salient of these, I think, was the exposure of kids to the seedier side of the Internet. Sexual predators prowled the web, seeking out new victims. Child pornography was more readily shared. While the Internet allowed people to explore many interests, it also permitted people to group together for their dark sides. Hackers developed schemes for stealing information and taking control of users' computers. Society was unable to devise ready solutions to be these problems. Law enforcement agencies had to develop their own strategies for coping wit new forms of crime. With time, society was able to develop reasonable strategies for coping, but we're still working on these problems.
The third revolution, smartphones, was hugely beneficial, but it too created unanticipated problems, the most obvious being the harmful effects of social media on kids. The smartphone revolution hit us so quickly that we haven't had enough time to adapt to its challenges. There are still suicides by teenagers who feel humiliated by social media. Kids dedicate huge amounts of time to their smartphones; the average American teenager spends 7 hours and 22 minutes looking at screens. That's 43% of their waking hours.
This is clearly unhealthy; the teenage years should be spent playing, exercising, reading, and socializing. I am horrified to imagine the future behavior of a generation of people raised on the mental equivalent of junk food. How will these people ever be able to make any kind of contribution to society? How will they even be able to hold down a job? As yet, society has not had enough time to develop strategies for dealing with this dangerous behavior. We simply don't know what to do.
If you think that the smartphone revolution has been challenging, brace yourself for the AI revolution: it is surging forward much faster than any of the previous revolutions. Within just a few years, AI systems will be everywhere. Few people have any grasp of how this technology works, what it's capable of, and how it might be harmful to society.
Have no doubt that some people will find clever ways to use the new AI technology to hurt others. AI is developing faster than our society can respond to its challenges.
Many other technologies are developing rapidly, presenting society with even more challenges. We're seeing a huge range of technologies addressing climate change appearing. Many are innocuous, but some, such as geoengineering, raise profound questions that we have not begun to consider. In the medical field, we're seeing issues arising with genetic engineering that confound our ethical systems.
The key point to remember is that this is all happening faster and faster -- and therein lies the danger: we won't be able to adapt to new technologies quickly enough to insure their safety.