At the heart of this line of thinking is the notion that what matters most is intelligence, not biology. What are we humans? At the end of the day we are nothing more than biological containers for intelligence. And frankly, as containers go, biological ones are not ideal. We're frail, and superstitious. We don't live very long. We need to eat and sleep. We learn slowly. Each new generation spends years re-learning all the stuff that previous generations have already learned. Some of us get sick, and others then devote enormous resources to caring for the sick ones. It's all incredibly slow and crude. Progress takes forever.

So maybe we are just a stopping point. Maybe the whole point of biological creatures is to evolve into something that generates just enough intelligence to evolve into something else. Maybe our purpose is to create our own replacements. And maybe, thanks to computers and artificial intelligence, we are not far from reaching this huge evolutionary inflection point.

What Is To Be Done?

Others are thinking along these lines, and even trying to do something about it, as evidenced this terrific essay from the New York Times by Huw Price, a philosopher at University of Cambridge. 

It's a long piece but I've grabbed some highlights:

"I do think that there are strong reasons to think that we humans are nearing one of the most significant moments in our entire history: the point at which intelligence escapes the constraints of biology. And I see no compelling grounds for confidence that if that does happen, we will survive the transition in reasonable shape. Without such grounds, I think we have cause for concern.

"We face the prospect that designed nonbiological technologies, operating under entirely different constraints in many respects, may soon do the kinds of things that our brain does, but very much faster, and very much better, in whatever dimensions of improvement may turn out to be available."

Price and many others believe we are nearing the point at which artificial general intelligence is achieved. But this raises profound existential questions for us:

"Indeed, it’s not really clear who “we” would be, in those circumstances. Would we be humans surviving (or not) in an environment in which superior machine intelligences had taken the reins, to speak? Would we be human intelligences somehow extended by nonbiological means? Would we be in some sense entirely posthuman (though thinking of ourselves perhaps as descendants of humans)?"

The argument that some people put forward is that machines will never be able to do everything a human can do. They'll never be able to write poetry, or have dreams, or feel sorrow or joy or love. But as Price points out, who cares?

"Don’t think about what intelligence is, think about what it does. Putting it rather crudely, the distinctive thing about our peak in the present biological landscape is that we tend to be much better at controlling our environment than any other species. In these terms, the question is then whether machines might at some point do an even better job (perhaps a vastly better job)."

Of course machines will do a vastly better job at many things than we humans can do. Machines are already doing that in countless domains. Chess is one example. Stock market trading is another. Imagine what would happen to the world's markets, and thus to the world's economy, if tomorrow all the computers were shut off and we went back to doing it by hand. Imagine humans trying to compete side by side in this domain against machine. It's unfathomable.

Trying To Stop The Unstoppable

Price and others are trying to come up with ways to keep this from happening, or to make sure that "good" outcomes are more likely than "bad" outcomes. Toward that end Price has co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (C.S.E.R.) at Cambridge.

I think assigning values like "good" and "bad" to the various possible outcomes of an evolutionary process makes no sense. Evolution happens and we don't have control over it. Whatever rules some well-wishers might put into place to prevent certain outcomes, others will find ways to work around them. It's what Yale computer scientist David Gelernter calls "the Orwell Law of the Future," and it goes like this: Any new technology that can be tried will be.

We are on a path, and there is no stopping it. This is neither good nor bad, it just is. Was it bad when single-celled organisms evolved into more complex organisms and then got eaten by them? I suppose the single-celled organisms weren't psyched about it. But without that process, we humans wouldn't be here. And if now it is our turn to be erased by evolution, so what? From the perspective of the universe, who cares if humans cease to exist?

The great irony in all this is that we can't stop pushing forward with dangerous technologies (AI, bioengineering) because evolution has hard-wired our brains in such a way that we cannot resist pushing forward, even if the consequence of this ever-upward march of evolution is that we end up rendering ourselves extinct. We humans like to believe that we among all living creatures are special and unique. And we are, if only because we are the first species that will knowingly create something superior to ourselves. We will engineer our own replacements. Which when you think about it is both brilliant and phenomenally stupid at the same time. In other words, perfectly human.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

If you observe the trends in sensors, networked objects, and AI, it begins to seem inevitable that, while they're certainly the present, black rectangles are not the future. Computing can be much more intelligent and subtle than that. It can blend in and enhance our environment. Think visual or auditory signals triggered by the world around you, not navigating through apps on a screen.

In fact, the most innovative tech companies are already working on getting hardware and software out of our way entirely, so that we don't have to really use them at all. They just happen.

As one of my favorite tech observers, Kontra, noted this week, this seems to pose a problem for Apple. Apple is unique among mobile hardware manufacturers by having the whole business, hardware and software alike, rolled up into one. For Apple, the interface is the experience it sells, and the delightful hardware is the place where we make contact with it. If we're headed for a world where hardware disappears into the background, what does Apple have left to sell?

As Kontra observes, Apple's Siri interface is the key to riding out this transition. In this future we're imagining, there will be a wider variety of ways to interact with the computer. Not only will we use touch, movement, and voice, we'll be passively interacting with it all the time just by going about our business. The key to this computing experience is having an aware, intelligent assistant application that can understand all these inputs, and Siri is Apple's hope.

AI Isn't Easy

It's a tough climb, though. As my colleague John Paul Titlow writes, even though voice control's potential is amazing, it's pretty clunky so far. Kontra's post highlights the underlying challenges of gathering and understanding enough data to make this work, and we've already seen how much trouble Apple had there with Maps, a comparatively simple problem to solve.

One wonders whether Google's slow and steady approach will bear out, even though Apple is definitely winning the present, compared to Google's hardware partners individually. Google's Android strategy has created hundreds of millions of mobile Google users, no matter whose devices or OS versions they're using. Google has gathered tons of data about the world, and data is Google's specialty.

For that reason, Google Now is a much better AI assistant than Siri right now. I'd be using it if there was an Android device I liked better than the iPhone all around.

But again, that won't matter for long. Google is already working on heads-up display glasses as a future interface. Maybe Apple is, too, but they certainly aren't talking about it yet. By not worrying overly much about hardware and just concentrating on getting the software out there to collect the data, Google looks like it could leapfrog the black rectangle era and dominate the next one.

But Apple has a way of surprising everyone by announcing that the new era is already here. And when Apple does that, it unveils a new kind of computer and says you can have it next week. With the kinds of profits and loyalty Apple has built, it would be foolish to rule out another surprise.

But Silver was right and the pundits were wrong - and the impact of this goes way beyond politics.

Silver won because, um, science. As ReadWrite's own Dan Rowinski noted,  Silver's methodology is all based on data. He "takes deep data sets and applies logical analytical methods" to them. It's all just numbers.

Silver runs a blog called FiveThirtyEight, which is licensed by the Times. In 2008 he called the presidential election with incredible accuracy, getting 49 out of 50 states right. But this year he rolled a perfect score, 50 out of 50, even nailing the margins in many cases. His uncanny accuracy on this year's election represents what Rowinski calls a victory of "logic over punditry."

In fact it's bigger than that. Bear in mind that before turning his attention to politics in 2007 and 2008, Silver was using computer models to make predictions about baseball. What does it mean when some punk kid baseball nerd can just wade into politics and start kicking butt on all these long-time "experts" who have spent their entire lives covering politics?

It means something big is happening.

Man Versus Machine

This is about the triumph of machines and software over gut instinct. 

The age of voodoo is over. The era of talking about something as a "dark art" is done. In a world with big computers and big data, there are no dark arts.

And thank God for that. One by one, computers and the people who know how to use them are knocking off these crazy notions about gut instinct and intuition that humans like to cling to. For far too long we've applied this kind of fuzzy thinking to everything, from silly stuff like sports to important stuff like medicine.

Someday, and I hope it's soon, we will enter the age of intelligent machines, when true artificial intellgence becomes a reality, and when we look back on the late 20th and early 21st century it will seem medieval in its simplicity and reliance on superstition.

What most amazes me is the backlash and freak-out that occurs every time some "dark art" gets knocked over in a particular domain. Watch Moneyball (or read the book) and you'll see the old guard (in that case, baseball scouts) grow furious as they realize that computers can do their job better than they can. (Of course it's not computers; it's people who know how to use computers.)

We saw the same thing when IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997. We saw it when Watson beat humans at Jeopardy.

It's happening in advertising, which used to be a dark art but is increasingly a computer-driven numbers game. It's also happening in my business, the news media, prompting the same kind of furor as happened with the baseball scouts in Moneyball.

Who wants to believe that machines can tell us which stories to write, or which stories people want to read? Who wants to believe that machines can actually write stories? But they do. Forbes, my former home, started running computer-generated stories earlier this year. 

Backlash

Each time this happens, there's always lots of sputtering and outrage. When you strip away the rhetoric, at the core is always the same fear - that machines will take away jobs from humans. Baseball scouts want to keep working. So do journalists and chess masters.

So do pundits, but after this election it's getting harder to see what role they should play.

Why listen to Joe Scarborough and his crew on MSNBC's Morning Joe show bloviate about who's going to win and why, when Nate Silver and his computers can just give you the correct answer?

Scarborough bet Silver $2,000 on the outcome of the election after accusing Silver of being an "ideologue" who was predicting an Obama win simply because that's what Silver wanted to happen.

Scarborough has lost a lot more than the two grand. He's lost his reason for being, and he has taken a lot of others down with him.

Scarborough, not Siliver, turns out to be the wishful-thinking ideologue. Nate Silver and his computers may not put Scarborough and his ilk out of business - there's loads of airtime to fill, and windbags are still needed for that.

But Silver has exposed those guys for what they are, which is propagandists and entertainers.

And that's fine. We still need entertainers. Computers haven't learned to do that yet.

For now, anyway. 

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock. Nate Silver image by Randy Stewart.