IBM Announces the End of the World
Woe to thee, ye of flesh and soul, the End is Nigh!
In an update to my reverie on the legal future of AI in our world “Do Robots Get Lawyers?”, I was watching CNBC, the business news channel a week or two ago, which mostly reports on the stock markets and ups and downs of economic forecasts, but sometimes offers interviews with executives of companies touting innovations and the prospects of business activities. When to my consternation, in one of those interviews I heard them announce the end of the world!
There are many pronouncements of doom and gloom and speculations of crashes in the economy, often disguised inducements to buy gold, but this was not one of those at all. This was a company proudly announcing a hopeful advancement in their expertise, and in it, I heard the end of the world, or at least the one with which we are familiar. The company was IBM and they were having a chat about their new world’s most powerful supercomputer, the Summit, built in a partnership with Nvidia and the US Department of Energy DOE, made of banks of servers in a warehouse-sized refrigerated underground bunker, capable of 200,000 trillion calculations per second. And it was one particular phrase that hit. The computer is using IBM’s work in Artificial Intelligence which drives their Watson language learning interface, now integrating itself into our life in many spheres, in housing climate controls, business and engineering applications, etc. The statement caught me was that the super computer’s AI was itself writing programs that were too complex to be written or even read by human beings.
A positive advance for society? Mankind’s utopian future, as imagined by Percy Shelley, with all out cares managed for us by computers with the voice of Watson or Siri? Dr. Stephen Hawking, who has now gone on his own exploration of the multiple universes, warned of the singularity, joined by others, like Bill Gates, warned that a danger to mankind was an AI that was faster, smarter and superior to the mind of man. In the 1990s James Cameron’s filmic invention of The Terminator, postulated a future where machines which built themselves hunted down, enslaved and exterminated man from the planet, with the singularity of the SkyNet defense computer system becoming self-aware. Well, the question to be asked, has IBM announced the invention of its version of SkyNet?
And BTW, they’re building another one, The Sierra, at Lawrence Livermore Labs to manage nuclear research. Dr. Strangelove, anyone?