It is not my aim to surprise or shock you. . . . But the simplest way I can summarize is to say that there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until—in a visible future—the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied 🙋

~ Herbert Simon (Nobel Prize-winning Al researcher, making a rather bold claim, circa 1957, when he, along with Alan Newell, developed the GPS (no, not that kind of GPS because what the two developed was the General Problem Solver, yes, that GPS!), a claim which surely had something to do with the “seasons” of AI that followed, both the “spring” season (think rise) and the “fall” (think decline)… Just my two cents’. Just sayin’)

Daddy’s flown across the ocean
Leaving just a memory
Snapshot in the family album
Daddy what else did you leave for me?
Daddy, what’d’ja leave behind for me?!?
All in all it was just a brick in the wall.
All in all it was all just bricks in the wall.

🏢 🏢 🏢 🏢 🏢 🏢 🏢 🏢 🏢 … 🏢

~ Pink Floyd (Lyrics from Another Brick in the Wall Lyrics – Part 1)

What You Got For Us This Time?

We Start With Good Old Guesswork

Let me guess what was going through your lovely mind as you sized up the stuff above—starting with the images of (1) the lonesome king chess-piece sitting atop a rock 🀄, then (2) someone’s daddy flying across the Atlantic in a Spitfire or something 🚁, and finally (3) the hard-hitting Pink Floyd lyrics excerpt (from their uber-phenomenal album The Wall) about Daddy 🌊 having flown across the ocean—as you were making attempts, at once noble and valiant meaning-making, to connect the dots… 💪

Hmm… So what could this essay be all about?

But of course, it’s all clear as mud, um, I had meant—darn those pesky Freudian slips—to say of course, “as clear as daylight!” So our essay this time’s (but of course!) all about why you absolutely, positively want to pay attention to the superintelligence juggernaut—I mean, how obvious is that?

Okay, okay, I’ll fess up now… Fair and square, all I was doing there was exercising my artistic license (and frankly, getting carried away, too, in the process). Oops… 🙊

Explaining Metaphysics to the nation–
I wish he would explain his Explanation 😉
~ Lord Byron (Don Juan: Dedication)

Meanwhile, to avert a disastrous outcome—such as you running away sobbing and screaming in disbelief at the disjointness of this all—let’s quickly (I mean, real quick) set matters straight!

Hey, How About A Half-Decent Definition?

So this time around (and unlike as in another handful of recent essays), we’re going to dive headfirst into the good stuff. No digressions, no nothing. No fluff, all stuff, all the time! (Hey, most of the time anyway; I mean, you’ve got to cut your blogger some slack so he can indulge in the occasional digression—read “exploration”—or two, or three, or… You got the idea, right?)

And best of all—here I’m going out on a limb—you’ll scarcely, if at all, run into any disjointness whatsoever! Now how cool is that? Yes, yes? Great! Woohoo!! 🎈

(You didn’t think you would ever see this day, with the new dawn of digressions-kept-in-check, now did you?)

Meanwhile, by now you’re probably dying to ask something along the lines of: “Hey, how about, like, giving us a half-decent definition of ‘superintelligence’ at this time, for crying out loud?” 

“But of course,” I says, “that’s right up next! Collect $200 as you pass Go!“

Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine;
Babbles the bee in a stolid ear; 🐝
Pipe the sweet birds in ignorant cadence,—
Ah, what sagacity perished here! 🐥
~ Emily Dickinson (In IV, from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson)

A Bird’s Eye View

To put the wherewithal of this essay in context, and before we make a quick pit stop at the Preamble—it’s coming right up next, just before we dive right into the 15-element collage which is pretty much the essay proper—let’s you and I get a sense for what we are looking at. Think of this as the view from 50,000 feet in the sky… 🚁

But first things first: What, exactly, is Superintelligence?

It appears that Nick Bostrom—he’s a professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University and founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute—has written the proverbial book on the subject, not to mention the tastefully bound cloth edition of the book which sits at my desk at home as I write this! (More on that soon…) 

So Bostrom defines “superintelligence” like this, starting with how

A superintelligence is a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human minds. “Superintelligence” may also refer to a property of problem-solving systems (e.g., superintelligent language translators or engineering assistants) whether or not these high-level intellectual competencies are embodied in agents that act in the world 💹

And speaking of Superintelligence the book, it ranked #17 on the New York Times list of best-selling science books for August 2014.

Some More Breadcrumbs (To Save For… Consumption Later!)

In the same month (i.e. August 2014), Elon Musk made headlines by agreeing with the book’s theme that artificial intelligence (AI) is potentially more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Hey listen, relax: More details—really cool stuff involving thoughts from Bill Gates, Baidu’s CEO (Robin Li), and others—can be found online about Bostrom’s work on superintelligence…

I invite you to check out those details after, of course, reading this essay by yours truly, and not before! (By all means, bookmark those pages for perusal later) But first,  I invite you to drink deep at the well of writing goodness—right here of course, where else?!—before venturing out to follow the breadcrumb trail (the hyperlinks and stuff) that I liberally offer you here… 😉

To pique your interest, here I’m going to quote merely (the following) three rave reviews for Bostrom’s book on the subject of superintelligence. More—much more, I promise—on Bostrom’s book coming your way real soon! 

Russell, Tegmark, & Musk On Superintelligence (The Book)

Meanwhile, check out these reviews, starting with the one (by Stuart Russell at the University of California, Berkley) which directly led me rush to my local brick-and-mortar bookstore and grab a copy—after purchasing it, hey now, and that, too, with my own money, come to think of it, yo smart aleck back there in the last row—of the book from the Oxford University Press and devour it:

Oh, and while I’m at it, let me clarify the aims of this essay. That’s next…

A Thematic Pattern Language

So what I had in mind as the major goal of this essay was a melding at the confluence of (at least) the following three elements,  each one of them carefully curated (the Thematic Images and the Poems) or  put together (the Commentary). So when you get to the collage—which makes up the bulk of this essay—you’ll find each of the 15 elements arranged along the lines of these elements, hopefully making for a seamless and pleasing reading experience for you:

• Thematic Images 🎭
• Poems 👒
• Commentary 📣

Now how about that for a ragtag list! The major aim—this is crucial so please pay special attention—that I had in mind as I put this essay together was to weave the elements above for you into a coherent whole. Thus, each of the 15 items that make up the collage (which is the centerpiece of this essay) follow the (recurring) pattern of the three elements above—hopefully, the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts!

One more thing real quick: I can guarantee that you’ll be disappointed if you come to this essay expecting a dissertation on superintelligence, which it surely is not! It is, however, a carefully considered “distillation” of sorts… 📦 🌹 📦 🌹 📦 🌹 📦 

Superintelligence: Distilled To Its Eessence

I’ve painstakingly assembled the elements which I believe represent the essence of superintelligence (in my own words for the larger part)—doing my utmost to weave them into a unified whole for you—in order to save you from having to wade through boatloads of reading material.

So that’ll be the tacit “contract” (aka understanding) between you and me this time; with clear expectations (as I’ve tried my best above to lay them out), I think we’re going to have ourselves some fun! 🎡

Again, think of what follows as a riotous swim through the essence of superintelligence, its “distillation”—better still, I invite you to turn your mind toward the everyday metaphor of the “perfume” which is nothing but a “distillation” of sorts and a bottle of which you can always get from JCPenney and of course from Marshalls if you’re like me and want to dress for less—and you’ll be good 👞 👡 👟 👠 👢 👣

I promise 😎

Ready to go? So what are you waiting for?

Let’s go!

Pinning Down The Visceral Nature Of Superintelligence

So while it’s practically impossible to pin down the implications of superintelligence (from the standpoint of paths, dangers, and strategies) in a single essay—after all it took Bostrom an entire book to lay out his case—the following dialogue, which is from the science-fiction action-horror movie The Lawnmower Man, comes pretty close, I’d say, to capturing the visceral nature of the beast that is superintelligence… 🐉

I hasten to add that my decision—and I stand by it—to portray the science-fiction movie The Lawnmower Man as coming darn close to capturing the essence of superintelligence was made only after a lot of deliberation.

So while my choice is admittedly imperfect, I still think that we’ve got for ourselves the right sort of mental model around which to have an intelligent discussion. Hey, remember what Don box said, and here I’m paraphrasing from memory, so please take this with a grain of salt: all models are wrong, but some models are more useful than others… 🔮

So there!

Mowing The Yard On The Way To… Superintelligence!

It goes like this—and now we’re starting to deploy in earnest our mental model of sorts (the science-fiction movie of course that we were chatting about a moment ago): Near the climactic, cliffhanger end, we have this dialogue—so Jobe Smith is a simple-minded gardener, Dr. Lawrence Angelo is the scientist who decides to experiment on him, and Peter Parkette, Dr. Angelo’s young neighbor, is friends with Jobe)—taking place as a flurry of rapid-fire exchanges.

So here we are, with Jobe on the verge of becoming transformed into an uncontrolled and unfettered superintelligent being, permeating the digital network infrastructure of the world:

 — “Peter, where are you going? I want you to come right back.”
 — “Jobe, wait up! I told him to come down here and pick me up after work.”
 — “What’s going on here? So you were willing to die?”
 — “I’ll stop them.” 🚧
 — “You lost all your power over the physical world… once you transferred in here.”
 — “Stop! So you’ve given me one final game to play. I find a way out, or I die in this diseased mainframe. But that’s not my destiny. I have things to do, people to see… a billion” calls to make ☎ ☎ ☎ ☎ ☎ ☎ … ☎
 — “You will die in the explosion.”
 — “You’re trapped. You’re trapped in here, aren’t you? You’re trapped right here.”
 — “Peter is here. Jobe, he’s in here.” ⛔
 — “He’s going to die.”
 — “Jobe, please.”
 — “Please, Jobe!” 😰
 — “Don’t sacrifice Peter.”
 — “You and I have been responsible… for so much destruction.”
 — “What’s happening? I don’t want more death.” 
 — “Go. Save him.” 💪
 — “Jobe, come back with me.”
 — “Hurry!”
 — “Go!”
 — “Access denied.” 🚫
 — “Help! I’m lost! Somebody!”
 — “We’ve got to get out of here!”
 — “The whole building’s going to blow up!”
 — “The door’s locked! It won’t open!” 🔒
 — “Open.”
 — “Run, run!”
 — “Access denied.” 🚫
 — “Get down, Peter! Quick!”
 — “Get down! There’s got to be one.”
 — “Let me in!” ⛔
 — “Come on, Peter, quick!”
 — “Peter, come on. Where is it?”
 — “Access denied.” 🚫
 — “Maintenance line access granted. A back door.” ⛳
 — “Get out of here! Go now! Last journal entry for a while.”
 — “I won’t let Jobe’s death be for nothing. What happened to him is my responsibility.”
 — “For some reason, I’ve been given a second chance… so I’m taking my work underground. I can’t let it fall into the wrong hands again.” 👺
 — “If we can somehow embrace our wisdom… instead of ignorance… this technology will free the mind of man… not enslave it.”
 — “We’re ready. Good.”
 — “They’ll be here soon.”
 — “OK. Let’s go.” 🏃

And here we are again—our mouth agape in childlike awe—wondering if we might have been better off had Pandora’s Box never been opened 🎁, had the genie never escaped its selfsame bottled captivity 👻, had Cassandra never prophesied 👰, had…

Preamble 💋

Simplicity Itself, Methinks…

Let’s start with a simple question: “So does anybody here remember Vera Lynn?” No, no,no—so I really need to cut down on my Pink Floyd lyrics excerpts—I had actually meant to say, “Does anybody here remember “The Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows?”

“Like, what?”, I hear your plaintive reply.

“Um… No worries, you’re good; as long, of course, as you keep coming back to read up the essays around here, hah!”

In all seriousness, though, I came across that fable (i.e. The Unfinished Fable) in the pages of a very cool book that I had alluded to earlier:

• Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom (Oxford University Press)

The fable is at once charming, disarming, deep, and—if you’re not careful to have your wits about you when you read it—it just might make you lose sleep 😴 I kid you not… It’s something else!

Of Seagulls and Sparrows

By the way, I had made mention of this very book elsewhere (come to think of it now) as recently as in the previous essay, where it was accompanied by the graceful image of Jonathan Livingston Seagull; I should’ve really used a smattering of sparrows there, course, instead of the lovely seagull accompanying my brief narrative there—actually more of a preamble—but clearly the idea (i.e. sparrows and not seagulls!) had not crossed my mind at that time… Oh well, live and learn 🎓

Anyhow, this remarkable book (Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies) just happens to begin with The Unfinished Fable! So you can tell that (1) either the fable is darned important to the book’s central theme or (2) the author’s got something up his sleeve (like the proverbial magician’s rabbit or something; wait, they pull those out of hats now and not sleeves… Hmm…)

The Unfinished Fable, But With A Punchline

Let’s lighten up the suspense, shall we, with a brief excerpt from The Unfinished Fable, as it appears at the outset of Superintelligence:

Deliciously enough, teasingly enough, the author (Bostrom) tacks on the following tantalizing thought to the end of The Unfinished Fable:

It is not known how the story ends, but the author dedicates this book to Scronkfinkle and his followers 🌹

Now how cool is that? I mean…

What. A. Punchline! 👊

A Writer In Love With Words

For one thing, we sure got ourselves a writer—in Bostrom—who is clearly in love with words. I think that’s awesome. So, without wasting a second, I’ve added him to my short list of fellow authors whose work I admire. These authors are, in their own unique way each, equally in love with the allure of words as I am; their names appear below, along with an accompanying link each which highlights either (1) something that I’ve written about them, or (2) one of their memorable works that’s especially meaningful to me 🍒

Those writers are, in no particular order, the following:

• Stephen King 🌿
• Mary Karr 🌹
• James Gleick 🌿
• William H. Gass 🌿
• Philip M. Bromberg 🌿
• Edward Ashford Lee 🌿
• Stuart Russell 🌿
• Peter Norvig 🌿
• Kitty Fassett 🌹
• Nick Bostrom 🌿

Every single author in the list above writes awesome prose! May they—if they haven’t already by the time you read this—win a Pulitzer Prize each; I’ve already won mine…

Yo, like, how so, Mr. Smarty Pants Blogger? May we see some proof of your having won a Pulitzer? Or shall we head over to your favorite court of law and meet the language lawyers?

Your Blogger Gets A… Pullet Surprise!

Aha, glad you asked! See, I’m always happy to answer questions of all kinds; those that I can and those that I can’t, with a preference in general for the former, notwithstanding pullet surprises 🐓

Look, don’t get me wrong—notwithstanding the tremendous honor that comes with winning a Pulitzer, a truly admirable recognition of sorts that it surely is—I haven’t won the Pulitzer (See, we got ya’, Mr. Writer Pants Blogger, caught red-handed contributing to the pathetic fake news that has come to plague our society of late!)

To cut a long story short, here’s the deal: My Pulitzer—while it comes with neither monies nor trophies—is every bit as symbolic and meaningful to me as if I had won the Pulitzer. “And what might that be, Mr. Blogger Pants?”, I hear you ask 👖

Once again, so glad you asked… Why, thank you, again 🙆 It goes like so…

In The Grand Tradition Of Self-effacement…

It is the recognition—whose acceptance, in full candor, I still struggle with, finding myself eminently unworthy of the plaudit—which means the world to me (the riches of which I don’t expect anyone to comprehend, especially since I myself haven’t been able to fully comprehend the multifaceted plaudit, buried as I remain beneath the weight of its ethereal wonderment that lifts me up in its unbearable lightness, in its lovely heaviness) and which was expressed in the following ineffable words. Words that could only have come from a fellow writer who cares deeply for her craft and who, by the way, I revere as the very embodiment of graciousness 🐱

“Plenty said, already.”, I hear… And not only from my own conscience, but also from yours, and to which you add, I see, as your lips move: “Time to move on, Mr. Pulitzer Pants!” 🏆

And so it shall be 👍

Listening To (The Siren Calls Of) Superintelligence

Indeed, it’s time now to dive headlong into the fantastic voyage of superintelligence. Ready or not, here we come, superintelligence!  🏊

Of Things Rosy & Cozy?

So all that talk of sparrow and owls (just a bit earlier) might have led you to think that perhaps Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies is about all things rosy and cozy…  🌹👚

Let me assure you that Superintelligence isn’t all—or even at all—about some idyllic garden populated by chirping sparrows and hooting owls. Not at all! It is, instead, about some serious stuff. I mean, we’ve got dead serious business on our hands: such as the kind where the very future prospect of humanity’s survival hangs in the balance…

Did that get your attention? Okay good, we’re on the same page, then. Let’s continue…

Brainstorming: The Presentational Aspects

So I did some brainstorming to come up with the best way to give you an idea of the depth and scientific vigor—imbued all the scene by deftly-applied philosophical touches—with which Bostrom has tackled the ins and outs of the paths, dangers, and strategies which are (at least it definitely should be) part and parcel of the terrain of superintelligence 💁

(The results of that brainstorming are, of course, to be found in that earlier section entitled “A Thematic Pattern Language”) 📍

By the way, was the tail-end of The Unfinished Fable (the so-called “punchline” I had referred to a couple of sections earlier) an artistic startlement or what?

I’ll add only this much that there may well be other dimensions that perhaps registered subliminally when we broached the subject of “artistic startlement”—and here I’m reminded of Bollas’ haunting phrase when he mentioned about the “unthought known”—but of which I’m not quite aware at the moment. Referring here to what Wallin had in mind when he noted how:

In his final book on attachment, Bowlby quotes Freud who remarked on the characteristic response of the patient who has become aware of something “forgotten”: “As a matter of fact I’ve always known it; only I’ve never thought of it” (Bowlby, 1988, p. 101). Perhaps Christopher Bollas (1987) who coined the evocative phrase “the unthought known” was reading the same passage from Freud 😗

~ David J. Wallin PhD (Attachment in Psychotherapy, Guilford Press)

How about all that for the beginnings of an essay on… superintelligence?! 👻

Hey, Cassandra! Where are you now? What has become of you? And of… Vera Lynn?

Rundown Of The (Sneakily Superintelligent) Sojourns Ahead ⛱ 

 

The 15—Quoth The Raven ‘And Noooo More’—Pit Stops

So here’s what Poe’s raven doth quoth and begin to croak, um, wax lyrical about—as it got more and more croaky-n-jokey and as Poe got deeper and deeper into his hopeless routine of sleepwalking—the following 15 pit stops where the big challenge for you will be to deftly skirt around, um, The Pit and the Pendulum 🎻

1. Past developments and present capabilities 🌱
2. Paths to superintelligence 🚂
3. Forms of superintelligence 👻
4. The kinetics of an intelligence explosion 🚀
5. Decisive strategic advantage 🏄
6. Cognitive superpowers 🐙
7. The superintelligent will 🎯
8. Is the default outcome doom? 🗿
9. The control problem 🔐
10. Oracles, genies, sovereigns, tools 👿
11. Multipolar scenarios 🐭
12. Acquiring values 💰
13. Choosing the criteria for choosing 😼
14. The strategic picture 🎪
15. Crunch time 🏈

Ready to rock and roll? And no, we’re not going on a stroll—you had better strap on your seat-belts tightly or so I’ve been told! 🎢

A Mention I Simply Couldn’t Resist…

Disclaimer: Don’t anyone now get me started on how I feel about the Stephen King quote above… The way King put it is spot-on: I feel my breath taken away every time I read it. Breathtakingly beautiful, despite their workmanlike brusqueness; perhaps due to their workmanlike brusqueness. Beauty and power (inasmuch as we speak of the world of writing) are strange bedfellows, sometimes originating in the most unusual of places 👀

Magnificently stated, King makes an incredibly important point above; I feel really, really, really strongly about it—don’t anyone now get me started… 🙉

Akram, calm down now… There is—I have in fact already written a bit it—a whole essay to be written on the subject of the sentiment expressed above (by King, and elaborated-on a bit by yours truly). And yes, we’ve meanwhile got a whole new essay (for me to write, and for you to read), so let’s go!

1. Past Developments And Present Capabilities 🌱

Her public is the noon,
Her providence the sun,
Her progress by the bee proclaimed
In sovereign, swerveless tune 🎶
~ Emily Dickinson (In XIV: PURPLE CLOVER, from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson)

See the bud above? Innocuous, yet-to-blossom, and wrapped-up in its cocoon-like innocence. Indeed, our own beginnings—as a species inhabiting planet Earth—are, dare I say, equally humble, if not more so. Utterly helpless babies that we are when we arrive on this planet (far more helpless, as a matter of fact, than even most baby animals), we go to an incredible maturation process which equips us to become masters of all we view…

But ah, what about the seasons of hope? And what about the season of despair? Them seasons… And them human-beginnings—pitifully humble beginnings that yank us back, startled and all, straight back through the mists of time…

Fast-forward now to the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College, where a handful of scientists with a shared interest in neural nets, automata, and the workings of intelligence have convened for a week-long workshop. This, as you will find out when you read Bostrom’s book on superintelligence, is the Dartmouth Summer Project: this is the dawn of artificial intelligence as a field of research, as Bostrom puts it, and to which I’ll add that this field (AI) will come to stand on its own feet unlike any other in human history (not to mention the “minor” detail of how it will come to metamorphose human civilization itself!) 👹

All the goods on the cool stuff above, and more—much more—can be found in the gripping pages of the fine book that is Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.

And how better to set the stage for our cruise through the wondrous journey which Nick Bostrom takes us along for—in his remarkable book (Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies)—than introducing the wherewithal (of past developments and present capabilities) from the chapter which bears that name. Referring to the journey of supercharging our understanding of superintelligence, Bostrom tells us how

That old chap’s got his metier down pat. At the same time—putting my writer hat on—I must confess, and a bit enviously, too, that Bostrom sure knows a thing or two about grabbing one’s attention, our mindshare, and everyone’s interest (Mr.  Bostrom, when you read this, please know that I’m darned impressed by how you’ve managed to bring a seemingly esoteric subject (superintelligence) to Technicolor life! Care to share your writing secrets with a fellow writer?)

With that—and you really ought to read the details for yourself in the pages of what has turned out to be yet another fine book from the Oxford University Press—let’s move on to the varied paths which lead us (sometimes meandering, and sometimes not; sometimes bifurcating, and sometimes not) to superintelligence itself. Ready? Let’s go 🚥

2. Paths To Superintelligence 🚂

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,
And human love will be seen at its height.
Live in fragments no longer.
Only connect… 👪

~ E.M. Forster (in Howards End)

So you glanced at the motley crew standing above, all of them pretty much waist-deep in a swamp somewhere… Dare I say that our inextricably subliminal roots in nature (and biology) somehow found themselves rising all over again in our mind? Man, this is déjà vu all over again! Shall we show who is boss around here? Hey you, machine, “Listen up. You’re still our servants, and we your superior masters. You got that? Good.”

One day—and it’s only a matter of time before that day arrives—those machines will be superintelligent. It’s only a matter of time. So it only behoove us (and I’m assuming that it’s reasonable enough that we humans want the machines to forevermore remain our obedient servants) to get a good sense for stuff like biological cognition, human–machine interfaces, and stuff like that so we can, in turn, get a good sense for the technological paths which will take us to that not too distant future.

Will you stand above me?
Look my way, never love me
Rain keeps falling, rain keeps falling
Down, down, down
Will you recognize me?
Call my name or walk on by
Rain keeps falling, rain keeps falling
Down, down, down, down
Hey, hey, hey, hey
Ohhhh…
Don’t you try to pretend
It’s my feeling we’ll win in the end
I won’t harm you or touch your defenses
Vanity and security 💝

~ Simple Minds (Lyrics from Don’t You (Forget About Me))

I must confess that Bostrom’s unique take on whole brain emulation resonated with me the most (specifically in this chapter). There’s a bunch of other cool stuff that he also delves into—notably including networks and organizations— which will be, IMHO, well worth your while to study in some depth.

Remember, this essay is exactly that: an essay. I can sketch the crucial essence of the book’s narrative; to really (I mean really, really) master the subject, you simply have to grab a copy of the book. Luckily, it’s written in an engaging style, so you won’t get bored—pretty good stuff! 🔨

Machines are currently far inferior to humans in general intelligence. Yet one day (we have suggested) they will be superintelligent. How do we get from here to there? This chapter explores several conceivable technological paths. We look at artificial intelligence, whole brain emulation, biological cognition, and human–machine interfaces, as well as networks and organizations. We evaluate their different degrees of plausibility as pathways to superintelligence. The existence of multiple paths increases the probability that the destination can be reached via at least one of them.

3. Forms Of Superintelligence 👻

— Dr. Lawrence Angelo: “This is all so new.”
— Jobe Smith: “It’s not new. I realized that nothing we’ve been doing is new. We haven’t been tapping into new areas of the brain – we’ve just been awakening the most ancient. This technology is simply a route to powers that conjurers and alche s used centuries ago. The human race lost that knowledge and now I’m reclaiming it through virtual reality.”
— Dr. Lawrence Angelo: “You’re moving too fast. Even with all these new abilities, there are dangers. Man may be able to evolve a thousand-fold through this technology, but the rush must be tempered with wisdom.” 😳
~ The 1992 science-fiction action-horror movie The Lawnmower Man (The main characters are Jobe Smith, who is a simple-minded gardener, and Dr. Lawrence Angelo, the scientist who decides to experiment on him.)

Ah, as for the image above—symbolizing as it does how the human race is neck deep in the global race for gaining the upper hand in technological prowess—my mind spontaneously turns to the climactic point in the movie (The Lawnmower Man) where Jobe (the simple-minded gardener) is on the verge of getting transformed into an uncontrolled and unfettered superintelligent being, permeating the digital network infrastructure of the world… 👻

Oh, and since I made mention—in the previous section—of what we can accomplish through the medium of an essay, this is probably as good a time as any to share a hilarious quotation (it’s progenitor, the inimitable lexicographer Samuel Johnson from olden times, I’m willing to wager, likely didn’t have hilarity on his mind, though; as a matter of fact, and as best I have been able to find, Johnson was far more to moroseness and that sort of thing). Anyhow, his marvelously irrepressible quotation captures zeitgeist of what a given essay in particular, and essays in a general sense, carries with it, the seeds with which it’s pregnant:

ESSAY—A loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition.

Now was that cool or was that cool? I mean, for one thing, Johnson sure didn’t take any prisoners in his hand-to-hand (linguistic) combat, now did he? For another, Johnson’s definition above is a picture-perfect description of my essays! And finally, it reminds me, word for word—maybe it’s the cheeky stance that did it—of a David Deutsch quote… 🏂

But I digress.

Do please remember, though, that this essay is exactly that: an essay. I can sketch the crucial essence of the book’s narrative; to really (I mean really, really) master the subject, you simply have to grab a copy of the book. Luckily, it’s written in an engaging style, so you won’t get bored—pretty good stuff!

You get to find a ton of fun stuff as Bostrom neatly sidesteps a veritable medley of terminological swamps, giving the reader instead a world-class education in the epic struggle of man and machine coming to grips with the fate of each other; whether it’ll be a shared future, one shared by man and machine working together— and I have reason to believe that it will—is not a foregone conclusion by any means… We can do things today to make it a win-win outcome!

4. The Kinetics Of An Intelligence Explosion 🚀

For endless pleasure, by some coward blushes:
Yet must I be a coward! Horror rushes
Too palpable before me–the sad look
Of Jove–Minerva’s start–no bosom shook
With awe of purity–no Cupid pinion
In reverence vail’d–my crystalline dominion
Half lost, and all old hymns made nullity!
But what is this to love?
O I could fly With thee into the ken of heavenly powers,
So thou wouldst thus, for many sequent hours,
Press me so sweetly. Now I swear at once
That I am wise, that Pallas is a dunce–
Perhaps her love like mine is but unknown–
O I do think that I have been alone 🙌

~ John Keats (from BOOK II)

You may have recognized in the image above the awesomeness that is the experience of watching a space shuttle blasting off into the skies—in its journey onward into space—symbolizing the magnificence of our country’s space program.

And we have liftoff, woohoo! (We were peering into the future and saw that the machines had attain some form of human-equivalence in general reasoning ability). Let me rephrase that: we will have liftoff, when the time inevitably arrives and our creation—the machines—have acquired (attained is probably the better word) general reasoning ability and are well on their way to super intelligence. The kinds of questions that should keep us awake at night, Bostrom rightly reminds us, should include the following:

• How long will it then be before they [the machines] attain radical superintelligence? ⏰
• Will this be a slow, gradual, protracted transition? ⏳
• Or will it be sudden, explosive? 🚀

I thought that this was one of the coolest chapters of the book; having been an ardent student of physics (way back when I was earning my BS at the University of Houston and where I majored in electrical engineering), the mere mention of the word “kinetic” by Bostrom immediately grabbed my attention! (See, diction does matter after all…)

All in all, a very nice foray into the terrain of, in Bostrom’s words, the “kinetics of the transition to superintelligence as a function of optimization power and system recalcitrance.”
(One more time, Mr.  Bostrom, when you read this, would you care to share your writing secrets with a fellow writer?)

5. Decisive Strategic Advantage 🏄

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference 👣
~ Robert Frost (from the poem The Road Not Taken)

So I don’t know about you, but when I look at the image above, the unmistakable emotion I feel is one tinged by reflections of the choices we made, the paths we took, as well as the paths which we did not take; trajectories diverged, perhaps even veered, pulling us inexorably in their wake in a certain direction.

Having had some fun with the question of “kinetics” in the previous section, you probably had the premonition that we were fast approaching a fork in the road. Indeed, we are faced with bifurcating paths and the vexing question is: which direction to be travel in? One more time, everyone: Arghh…

(If only someone can give me the whereabouts of whoever said that life is a bowl of cherries, I sure would like to have a word with them at this time… 🍒)

Anyhow, what we got here—again, are running narrative are the chapters of Bostrom’s Superintelligence  along which we are merrily and sequential wending our way—is a thoughtful consideration of whether you’re talking about a single superintelligent power or many.  Whether we can take some comfort in the choice of the path(s) we take, or don’t, knowing that other paths will be proceeding in unison. Or will they?

Playing the devils advocate here, and invoking Murphy’s Law, should be have that sinking feeling in our stomach that “an intelligence explosion propel one project so far ahead of all others as to make it able to dictate the future?”

Let me put it this way: please read this chapter was sitting down (you’ll need to be composed and calm to digest the implications of what Bostrom has to say here: How will progress unfold? As evolution or as a revolution? Uniformly or chaotically?) 😽

How will our future unfold? Veering in the monopolistic direction (where “one project [is] so far ahead of all others as to make it able to dictate the future”) or will we as global citizens see it “unfurling across a wide front, with many projects participating but none securing an overwhelming and permanent lead?”

I say, only time will tell… 🎃

6. Cognitive Superpowers 🐙

Or, you’ve seen a nomad’s dog
lying at the tent entrance, with his head
on the threshold and his eyes closed.
Children pull his tail and touch his face,
but he doesn’t move. He loves the children’s
attention and stays humble within it.
But if a stranger walks by, he’ll spring up
ferociously. Now, what if that dog’s owner
were not able to control it? 🐶

~ Jelaluddin Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi — HarperCollins)

Oh goodness, now is that one symbol-laden image above or what? (A superintelligent agent standing with arms outstretched, feet planted firmly—dare I say rooted to the point of the roots themselves being laid bare—and looking heavenward in the direction of a suspended orb which, in its selfsame mysticism, is showing the unmistakable strands of DNA even as the background is tinged by concentric circles of alternating black and white rings).

Hey, Jobe Smith (aka Lawnmower Man), where are you? Did Bostrom have a word with you? Did he now? 🍃 🍂 🍃 🍂 🍃 🍂 🍃 

Seriously, though, this was another standout chapter in Bostrom’s book. In particular, his narrative of “the takeover scenario [, which] illustrates how a superintelligent agent, starting as mere software, could establish itself as a singleton”, was pretty cool!

I particularly enjoyed (and appreciated) the way Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies takes a fair and balanced approach to the in-my-mind inevitable scenario in which a digital superintelligent agent comes into being and wants to take control of the world! What I especially appreciated was the absence of handwringing which can, alas, plague prognosticators in general and futurists in particular. Good job, Mr. Bostrom!

7. The Superintelligent Will 🎯

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal 🏀
~ Hannah More

Now who can claim to be more goal-driven—see the gorgeous primary colors of that parachute-like contraption above as they encircle their human payload in their jabbing announcement—than the paratrooper herself who has hurtled toward Earth with the single-minded goal of landing on firm ground?

Goals, goals, goals! Aren’t we, as a species, goal-driven at our essence? While we may understandably rejoice in this innately human capability, what about our superintelligent counterparts? What kinds of goals will they have on their agenda once they are alive and kicking? Will those goals aligned with ours? 💅

We’re talking about some pretty heady stuff… Again, I suggest that you read this chapter while sitting down. Please make sure you do. I repeat that. Please.

And when you do, make sure you don’t miss the author’s development of two remarkable theses:

• the orthogonality thesis (intelligence and final goals operate independently)
• the instrumental convergence thesis (superintelligent agents with even a wide range of final goals will pursue similar intermediary goals because they have common instrumental reasons to do so) 

8. Is The Default Outcome Doom? 🗿

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality 😵
~ Queen ( Lyrics from Bohemian Rhapsody)

Now more than ever, when torches and snare-drum
Excite the squat women of the saurian brain
Till a milling mob of fears
Breaks in insultingly on anywhere, when in our dreams
Pigs play on the organs and the blue sky runs shrieking
As the Crack of Doom appears 🌋
~ W. H. Auden

See the near-infinite grains of sand on the beach above? And while you were taking in the majestic spectacle of Nature’s infinite ways, I’m sure you also noticed the wantonly wayward tracks on the beach, the solitary bicycle left parked by its owner who is nowhere in sight, the rhythmic waves of the ocean gently crashing on the shore, and perhaps also the deep blue sky sheltering everything beneath it…

Oh my, we’ve got here all the makings of a warm, fuzzy—dare I say hypnotic?—afternoon at the beach. Or maybe not.  So what I’ve got in mind here is the “sandbox” (sorry, but in terms which are decidedly more  prosaic, a controlled and limited environment).

So what does this all have to do with… superintelligence? “Anything,” you impatiently ask, “anything at all?” 😼

Actually it does. And very fundamentally, too. Here’s how, but let me first ask you a question: Having observed with bated breath the behavior of AI agents—yes, exactly, in a “sandbox”—with the peace of mind that comes from having those agents play, so to say, in a controlled and confined environment, would you feel comfortable letting the AI out of the box? In other words, cutting the apron cord; put yet another way, letting AI loose?

Would you have any qualms about AI operating in an unfettered, unsupervised way? I don’t know about you, but I…

Look, notwithstanding my being a Sherlock Holmes fan—being the analytic computer scientist and engineer that I am while decidedly not being into tales of mystery and intrigue—would it be fair to assume that the word “treachery” nonetheless arose in your mind, too, as you absorbed what I said above (regarding possible qualms about AI operating in an unfettered, unsupervised way? Okay, good, we are in good company then: Bostrom makes a convincing case for how “the first superintelligence may shape the future of Earth-originating life, could easily have non-anthropomorphic final goals…” 😈

Yep, while this is not meant to be gloom and doom, the fact is that we—as the shepherds of superintelligence—had better pay close attention to to possibilities of “an ominous convergence in instrumental values.” Are you beginning to see how menacing this prospect just might be?

Again, the sky is not falling—at least not yet—but we had better make sure we don’t let that happen either! 🐥

9. The Control Problem 🔐

THEN a mason came forth and said, Speak to us of Houses.
And he answered and said:
Build of your imaginings a bower in the wilderness ere you build a house within the city walls.
For even as you have home-comings in your twilight, so has the wanderer in you, the ever distant and alone.
Would the valleys were your streets, and the green paths your alleys, that you might seek one another through vineyards, and come with the fragrance of the earth in your garments.
But these things are not yet to be.
In their fear your forefathers gathered you too near together.
And that fear shall endure a little longer.
A little longer shall your city walls separate your hearths from your fields.
And tell me, people of Orphalese, what have you in these houses?
And what is it you guard with fastened doors?
Have you peace, the quiet urge that reveals your power?
Have you remembrances, the glimmering arches that span the summits of the mind?

~ Kahlil Gibran (in “On Houses” from The Prophet)  🏰

Indeed, “And what is it you guard with fastened doors?”, is the primordial—more like incipient—thought which arose in my mind anyway as I looked again at the image above (another one of those that I had carefully curated from the public domain just for you)… 💁

What, exactly, are we locking out? And even more crucially, what, exactly, are we locking in? Anyone thought of the search for countermeasures in the scenario of an intelligence explosion? Those were my thoughts as I read this especially gripping part of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies…

Basically, should superintelligence grow out of control, will we have a handle on the problem? Do we have—as I alluded to above—a healthy dose of countermeasures at our disposal to deploy rapidly in the scenario of an intelligence explosion? If not, we are, frankly, toast, all of us on planet Earth.

If you turn your attention, just one more time if you could please, to the metaphor of the “fastened doors” (as in the image above) and imagine what would happen if we had no practical strategy at our disposal to lock things in? 🔐

So while you may have freedom without, do you have freedom within? And here I diverge somewhat from Bostrom’s choice of capturing—no pun intended, seriously—what happens when super intelligence grows out of control: while Bostrom uses the “explosion” metaphor, I prefer the one of “inundation” because it better captures the wherewithal of the deluge of all things superintelligent.

There is freedom within
There is freedom without
Try to catch the deluge in a paper cup
There’s a battle ahead
Many battles are lost
But you’ll never see the end of the road
While you’re traveling with me 🌊

~ Crowded House (Lyrics from Don’t Dream It’s Over)

 Regardless of which metaphor you prefer—Bostrom’s or mine—the bottom line is this: do we ever want to be in a position where we are forced to “catch the deluge in a paper cup”? Think we can all agree on that. Good, let’s do something about it; let’s give our all to the mastery of the control problem (which is basically the unique principal–agent problem that one’s bound to run  into when tinkering with the creation of an AI agent). As they say, forewarned is forearmed. Good enough?

If there’s time left at the end, we can also chat about “anthropic capture.” Meanwhile, full steam ahead to the… What in the world is that? A… somersaulting genie—oh my, what we got on our hands this time? 👳

10. Oracles, Genies, Sovereigns, Tools 👿

I am familiar with a number of experimental physicists and they are sort of men of the earth. Therefore, I have always suspected that, one day, working far away from theorists, close to their big machines, they will get the idea of a new experiment: an experiment which will test the oracle. They would like to see what would happen, just for the fun of it, if they falsely report that there exists a certain bump, or an oscillation in a certain curve, and see how the theorists predict it. I know these men so well that the moment I thought of that possibility I have honestly always been concerned that some day they will do just that 🙈

~ Richard P. Feynman (at the American Physical Society Annual Meeting, in 1950)

Woohoo! Don’t you love it when kids are having fun (I mean, check out the boy—or is it a genie?—in the remarkable drawing above as he somersaults in midair, defying gravity for a fraction of time in the glory of suspended animation.)

Let’s try a modern take on an age-old proposition—build a better mousetrap and they will come—by turning it on its head and proposing something like the following: Build AI agents that are better in their predictive powers and they will go… Did you notice the trailing “go” (replacing as it did the trailing “come” in the hoary counterpart of a proposition)? Yep, that wasn’t a typo; maybe fastidious isn’t quite how I would describe the attention I pay to my writing, but you get the idea, right? 👀

Basically, how far can you run with the idea (and taking a cue here from Feynman’s patently inimitable expression in the quote above about “…working far away from theorists, close to their big machines…”) that our zeal for theorizing and predicting, if not properly leavened by plain old common sense, can lead us into the weeds. Indeed, face first into the proverbial ditch. Painful. Let’s not go there!

I recommend to you—hey, by the way, I’m not your living and breathing recommender system, okay, LOL—Bostrom’s neat coverage of the types (essentially four) of these systems, which are:

• oracles 🔮
• genies 👻
• sovereigns 👑
• tools 🔧

Each of the above is a pretty big topic in itself, worthy of close study. Needless to say—and you knew this was coming and which is why I knew to better the hedge my bets and tack it on at the very end—each  comes with its own sets of advantages and (yep, you guessed it) disadvantages 🎯

One thing to remember: a deep understanding of how these (four) systems interrelate, diverge, and commingle with one another will be crucial in our quest to solve the control problem…

I don’t know of any other way to put it… without overstating their criticality!

Absolutely slick stuff; to put it bluntly, this topic—as a worthy subject of study—simply rocks! 🎸

11. Multipolar Scenarios 🐭

Security, the chief pretence of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone’s head  🔱
~ George Bernard Shaw

And what a study in contrasts (between the haves and the have-nots) is surely the image above that you may have spied by now: The very picture of the dignified establishment, King George V ( accompanied by his regal entourage, seated in an impeccable carriage) is accosted by a beholden, running beggar who has the audacity—and wits—to hold a bedraggled cap in his grubby, outstretched hand in the hopes of garnering a penny that would help quell the pangs of hunger that have clearly moved him to despair—and action 🏃

Once we get our global society to a point where superintelligent agents have permeated the very fabric of society, what comes next? Will be be in a good spot or bad? Will the by-then-pervasiveness of superintelligent agents lead to that gulf (between the haves and the have-nots) narrowing or widening? In other words, do we get a unipolar outcome or a multipolar one? What might such outcomes even look like?

“Akram, Akram,” I hear you say, “stop in the name of all things sacred! Sheesh, drowning us in that veritable deluge of questions… Yo, what’s up with that? Like, wassup? And do you want ketchup with that, or would you rather that be pelt a barrel of tomatoes at ya?” 🍅 🍅 🍅 🍅 🍅 

“Hey, hey, hey now”, I reply with a certain measure of polite diffidence, all the same adding, “Yo, Blair, I mean, yo, dear Reader, shall I disabuse you of the notion that forms the crux of rhetorical questions? I mean, the substrate itself.”

Condescension notwithstanding, we agree to disagree, and decide to move on… to?

“Where,” you ask, “are we going next?” 🚕

“Values,” I reply without missing a beat, “old chap, good old values and, specifically, how to, like, acquire them.”

Before you go there, I invite you to reflect—so that was the whole point of the boatload of questions I had posed above— and indeed, pause and deliberate. I think you will be pleased with your effort, pleased with yourself! 🙋

And when you have a minute, would you please let me know your thoughts on whether the resulting competitive society is attractive (and long-lasting) or not? Thank you.

12. Acquiring Values 💰

The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it  🎭
~George Bernard Shaw

Feedback taking place at a massively visceral—perhaps the better to call it viscerally massive—scale and at such a furious pace that all you may be able to glean from the image above are the flashes of near-synaptic-level firings as a superintelligence becomes un-bottled… (And you thought that the somersaulting genie walls were alarming enough already!)

Good old feedback systems… What’s there to not like about them? Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID, you know)  and all that other good stuff. In full candor, while the delightful Nyquist Diagrams and lovely old Root-locus Analysis were pretty cool, those darned Bode plots were not! (I mean… Do you really, really want to reminisce? Really?) 📐 📑 📈 📊 📉 📃 💸 👓 👒

We talked some about genies and oracles and stuff like that, remember? Hey, speaking of genies, here’s a question for you: Is your plan to keep superintelligence bottled up, like, forever?
Hey Akram, you been watching one Hobbit movie too many lately? (All this talk of genies and orcs and goblins has got us worried for you… We’d rather get rid of you, of course, but you’re far too valuable, you know. Oh, you didn’t know that? Oops… Goodness, we shouldn’t have brought this up then.)

To cut a long—really, really long—story short, the whole deal about “acquiring values” is the domain of what happens when we decide, intelligently enough, to let the genie (oops again, I meant, superintelligence of course!) out of the bottle… 👻

Indeed, the value-loading problem is a tough nut to crack, but one that has to be cracked. There’s no two ways about it. Period.

13. Choosing The Criteria For Choosing 😼

There is freedom within
There is freedom without
Try to catch the deluge in a paper cup
There’s a battle ahead
Many battles are lost
But you’ll never see the end of the road
While you’re traveling with me  🐎

~ Crowded House (Lyrics from Don’t Dream It’s Over)

Ahh… With her head sunk into her knees, and her hopes sunk far below the earthen surface of the dandelion forest in which she finds herself engulfed, a lonesome maiden is ruefully coming to grips with the consequences of a choice she has made (hastily, or otherwise, but made nonetheless… Arghh… Why doesn’t the reflexive making of good decisions— and only good decisions—come naturally to us as a species? Oh, why not? Arghh…)

Choices, choices, choices… Invoices, invoices, invoices… (Okay, so the second part there—having to do with the invoices—was admittedly a bit fanciful, but not by much, if only you care to hear more… Yes, yes?)

— Reader: “No.”
— Blogger: “Invoking all the powers—both intellectual and otherwise—with which Nature has profusely endowed me, I find myself gravitating (having done my level best to comprehend the import of your succinct statement above, consisting as it does of a single word, and that, too, made up of an amazingly scant two whole letters of the alphabet, in the general direction, somewhat fair-seeming though mostly forward-looking, that I ought to take your reply as a… No?“
— Reader: “Yes.”

Grr… 😡

With that, I… Sigh, I rest my case 📦

Oh, one thing—you knew it wasn’t going to be that easy to shake me off your trail— that I urge you to keep at the forefront of your mind (as you go about understanding the ins and outs of choosing the criteria for choosing) is a measured study of which value(s) to install (in superintelligent agents). This can have the most far-reaching of consequences. And while you’re at it, it’ll be a good idea to remember that the choice of those values might lock us—like, forever—into “the prejudices and preconceptions of the present generation” 💋

Sobering-enough thought there for you?

I agree. It’s time to move on to the penultimate item in our collage… 🚂

14. The Strategic Picture 🎪

Having gathered ourselves from the fallout from having made a bad decision (read, all-too-human) a moment ago—anyone remember the despair that loomed over our dandelion forest a moment ago?—we throw ourselves into the enterprise of getting some cool stuff done in the spirit of collaboration as we huddle around (donning bright, blue T-shirts apiece above) the target of our engines of ingenuity. Technological development—both differential and deferential at the same time and hand-in-hand, too—most go on. The show must go on… 🎬

I’m going to make the final two elements in our collage—this one and the next—far briefer than what you’ve seen so far. Cool?

“Hey,” I hear you add, “can you, like, make everything short and sweet?” 🍩 🍯

And I’m like… (Picture your blogger in a shell-shocked state, and dumbfounded—his ego tattered and torn, bulldozed-over—by the opinion above. And hey, insert one pathetic whimper right here <Sob>)

But let’s pick ourselves up, egos bruised and whatnot. And yes, the show must go on… One more time, Ooh ah the show must go on! 🎭

So, in a nutshell: What is the general direction that we should be heading in? I hasten to add that applying longitudinal science and technology-policy issues isn’t all that dreadfully boring as it’s made out to be. Trust me. It can be pretty cool,  especially when you throw in a good dose of—yay!—machine intelligence (ML).

(Easier said than done, you say, and I couldn’t agree more, for a change!)

15. Crunch Time 🏈

Why? Arghh… Why must life be so complicated?

Making bad decisions, and hopefully some good ones, too, along the way, we can’t help but wish—if only for a fretful moment or two—for the fog to lift for once and for all: will we humans forevermore trudge Sisyphus-style (and uphill, too, laboriously rolling the stone in front of us) and remain enshrouded by a dense mist of uncertainty? That’s right, my sentiments exactly: Arghh… 😿

Finding ourselves in the foggy uncertainty that seems to envelope any consideration of strategic complexity, what is want to do? That is the question I ask of you? Shall I put myself in your shoe? And sing a song blue?

Woohoo! We’re outta here, ladies and gentlemen. We may have started with a whimper, but we sure ended with a bang! 🎇

Is that cool or what (notwithstanding considerations of a crunch time predicament)?

Now the years are rolling by me
They are rockin’ evenly
I am older than I once was
And younger than I’ll be
But that’s not unusual
No it isn’t strange
After changes upon changes
We are more or less the same
After changes
We are more or less the same 🙆

~ Paul Simon (Lyrics from The Boxer) 

That sweet city [Oxford] with her dreaming spires 🎓
~ Matthew Arnold (in Thyrsis, st. 2)

It’s been (somewhat accurately) said that “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”,
To which I’ll add, “And nothing half as pleasant with which our world’s been adorned”

“Woman reduces us all to a common denominator”, so said Shaw,
Indeed, man deduces the best deal as bootstrapping this very flaw 👊

 ~ Akram Ahmad (“Fury & Fulmination” 💅 — a random ditty by a writer, blogger, software craftsman, son, husband, father, brother, and friend)

A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window 🏢
~ Gilles Deleuze

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it 😂
~ Omar Khayyám (from Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the great poet-astronomer’s work entitled The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám) 

So…

It all comes down to the Tardis in the image below… It just does.

Let me explain…

Ring, ring. Ring, ring… ☎

If you remember—from way earlier in this essay,  somewhere close to the Prelude section, where I was sharing my struggle to pin down the implications of superintelligence, and when we had started talking about that science-fiction action-horror movie The Lawnmower Man—we had found ourselves gravitating to the opinion that Jobe Smith (the simple-minded gardener who becomes the unwitting subject of Dr. Lawrence Angelo’s futuristic experiment) is perhaps the poster child of prototypical superintelligence ⛳

The Phantom Toolbooth anyone?

Yes, now how about that old chestnut, The Phantom Tollbooth? On the face of it, it’s merely a children’s fantasy adventure novel. But dig a bit deeper, and you’ll find the novel pleasingly wide-ranging in its expanse and deeply imaginative in its undertones. Finally—and fast-forwarding here the gestalt itself of The Phantom Tollbooth by a bunch of decades—what do we get?: Yep, we get the Hollywood trilogy we know well as The Matrix (the staggeringly unsettling undercurrents of that awesome, albeit dystopian, Hollywood set of movies are nevertheless fresh in conception, not to mention  wildly entertaining!)

Ring, ring. Ring, ring… ☎

Near the climactic, cliffhanger end (of movie The Lawnmower Man), we have the following dialogue—it involves Jobe Smith, Dr. Lawrence Angelo, and Peter Parkette, Dr. Angelo’s young neighbor who is friends with Jobe)—taking place as a flurry of rapid-fire exchanges 😰

Jobe is on the verge of getting transformed into a timeless, uncontrolled, unfettered super-intelligent being. Jobe’s on the brink of permeating the digital network infrastructure of the world:

 — “Peter, where are you going? I want you to come right back.”
 — “Jobe, wait up! I told him to come down here and pick me up after work.”
 — “You lost all your power over the physical world… once you transferred in here.”
 — “Stop! So you’ve given me one final game to play. I find a way out, or I die in this diseased mainframe. But that’s not my destiny. I have things to do, people to see… a billion” calls to make ☎ ☎ ☎ ☎ ☎ ☎ … ☎
 — “Peter is here. Jobe, he’s in here.”
 — “Jobe, please. Please, Jobe!”
 — “Don’t sacrifice Peter.”
 — “Go. Save him.”
 — “Jobe, come back with me.”
 — “Hurry!”
 — “Go!”
 — “Access denied.”
 — “Help! I’m lost! Somebody!”
 — “We’ve got to get out of here!”
 — “Open.”
 — “Access denied.”
 — “Get down! There’s got to be one.”
 — “Let me in!”
 — “Come on, Peter, quick!”
 — “Peter, come on. Where is it?”
 — “Access denied.”
 — “Maintenance line access granted. A back door.”
 — “Get out of here! Go now! Last journal entry for a while.”
 — “I won’t let Jobe’s death be for nothing. What happened to him is my responsibility.”
 — “For some reason, I’ve been given a second chance… so I’m taking my work underground. I can’t let it — fall into the wrong hands again.”
 — “If we can somehow embrace our wisdom… instead of ignorance… this technology will free the mind of — man… not enslave it.”
 — “We’re ready. Good.”
 — “They’ll be here soon.”
 — “OK. Let’s go.” 

And from there on, so the story goes, Jobe Smith—having been transformed into a superintelligence of sorts—infiltrates and then permeates (forevermore) the global digital network infrastructure… 👹

(Imagine, should you wish, something like the infinitude, near-neuronal in its vastness, of the exponentially growing interconnected nodes such as those depicted in the image below…) 📡

Experimental Afterword

So this is where we have complete freedom to romp around unfettered. Best of all, no more—read my lips,“no more”—moratoriums on our digressing. Allow me to rephrase EM Forster 😚

Only digress.

Woohoo! Let’s start with the following Emily Dickinson quote that a dear friend recently shared with me as they reflected back on the year that was 2017, saying that they were

Feeling “grateful for the roses in life’s diverse bouquet.” 🌻

Beautifully expressed! And to which I can only add—as one who believes that sleep is vastly underrated—that I’m reflexively reminded of what my nemesis (the Bard) once had Macbeth wax lyrical with righteous indignation this paean (more an ode-of-sorts) to the crucial subject of sleep 😴

Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep”—the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.

Methinks the Bard was an insomniac, not that it really matters; words never had it so good as when he was using them, which is why he will remain my cherished nemesis 👊

More stuff to follow… “You lose if you snooze” is what they say—clearly ingrate Philistines all when it comes to the oh-so delicate matter of sleep and such—so you might as well stay glued, tuned to the boob tube for what’s coming next 📺

Got More Stuff

Thank you for staying tuned… Yay, we now got more stuff for you—as promised—although you will need to make the effort to cruise past the image below of a mad scientist’s chemistry lab (Please be safe as I simply don’t have the wherewithal to guarantee your safe passage through the chambers of the mad scientist who ever remains capering with his chemistry experiments…) 👺

Oh my! What do we have here? As I squint at that thingamajig sitting on the red bench in the picture below… Oh my, if it isn’t a broken shard from our fabulous ornamental egg, if anyone remembers the landmark legal case—involving the momentous matter of “the Middle Endian” which had upended  the historic duo of “the Little Endian” and “the Big Endian”—and with which we had a blast just a couple of weeks ago… 🐣

Speaking of broken eggs and stuff… One comforting thing I spy right away is the absence of hatched chickens 🐥 🐥 🐥… 🐥 so I think we’ll be good; I mean you never really can tell—I still did not seem to quite have have the powers of clairvoyance last time I checked—what might be lurking around the corner to ruin an otherwise harmless-looking situation!

(Oh, and speaking of The Red Bench, we need conversations that matter, we need open spaces where people can gather, we need bold leaders who can lead the way, we need…) 🌱

To Be Continued…

After all, this is an “Experimental Afterword”! So expect

• More stuff…
• Yet more stuff…
• And still more stuff (which we’ll pile on right here…)
• 🐌
• 🐹
• 🙊