A Peek into the Future

In this short and compelling video, Kip Thorne, American theoretical physicist (picture here with Stephen Hawking), suggests that our descendants 300 years from now will look back on the work we’re doing today and thank us for providing an understanding of the universe and the way it behaves the way it does.  “In that sense,” he says, “the scientific enterprise is a cultural enterprise,” much like the Renaissance gave our culture today things like great art, music, architecture, and the scientific method.

But there’s a fly in the ointment.

It’s hard to imagine a future, certainly one 300 years hence, that looks anything like our world today, where the principal change is a more complete understanding of physics.

First of all, to get there, we will have had to have dealt successfully with the numerous existential threats to our civilization: environmental catastrophe, wide-scale nuclear war, super-virulent disease pandemic, world fascism, etc., none of which are foregone conclusions.

Also, we’re only a few decades from the point that artificial intelligence becomes superior to our own, at which point it will create further intelligence without any further direction from us.  It’s hard to overstate the impact this will have, given that the processing of information with electronic circuity happens billions of times faster than the biochemical circuitry in our brains.  AI performs the amount of thinking in two weeks that would require a team of researchers at CalTech 500,000 years.

As neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris points out in his Ted Talk on the subject, AI doesn’t have to turn malevolent on its own in order for it to annihilate humankind.  “Think of our relationship with ants,” he suggests.  “We don’t hate ants; in fact, we go out of our way to step over them when we encounter them on the sidewalk.  But when our wishes run counter to theirs, for instance, if we’re building a house, we wipe them out without the slightest qualm.”

Our civilization has a very short window of opportunity in which to avert these disasters.  But are we up to the task?

Maybe if would help to ask: How’s it going so far?  Well, to date, our approach includes climate denial at the highest levels of government, tax cuts for billionaires, using the legal system to enable lunatics to acquire machine guns, and taunting psychotic world leaders who are in possession of nuclear weapons.   I’m not sure I’d give us an A+.

The window’s closing.