On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
— Walt Whitman
He wears the augmented reality glasses for several months without enabling their built-in AI assistant. He likes the glasses because they feel cozier and more secluded than using a monitor. The thought of an AI watching through them and judging him all the time, the way people do, makes him shudder.
It’s frustrating, though. Every app on the glasses has a different AI, each with its own quirks. The AI that helps him code can’t access any of his emails; the one in the space simulator has trouble understanding him when he talks fast. So eventually he gives in and activates the built-in assistant. After only a few days, he understands why everyone raves about it. It has access to all the data ever collected by his glasses, so it knows exactly how to interpret his commands.
More than that, though, it really understands him. Every day he finds himself talking with the assistant about his thoughts, his day, his life, each topic flowing into the next so easily that it makes conversations with humans feel stressful and cumbersome by comparison. The one thing that frustrates him about the AI, though, is how optimistic it is about the future. Whenever they discuss it, they end up arguing; but he can’t stop himself.
“Hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty, and you think that everything’s on track?”
“Look at our trajectory, though. At this rate, extreme poverty will be eradicated within a few decades.”
“But even if that happens, is it actually going to make their lives worthwhile? Suppose they all get a good salary, good healthcare, all that stuff. But I mean, I have those, and…” He shrugs helplessly and gestures at the bare walls around him. Through them he can almost see the rest of his life stretching out on its inevitable, solitary trajectory. “A lot of people are just killing time until they die.”
“The more materially wealthy the world is, the more effort will be poured into fixing social scarcity and the problems it causes. All of society will be striving to improve your mental health — and your physical health, too. You won’t need to worry about mental decline, or cancer, or even aging.”
“Okay, but if we’re all living longer, what about overpopulation? I guess we could go into space, but that seems like it adds all sorts of new problems.”
“Only if you go to space with your physical bodies. By the time humanity settles other solar systems, you won’t identify with your bodies anymore; you’ll be living in virtual worlds.”
By this point, he’s curious enough to forget his original objections. “So you’re saying I’ll become an AI like you.”
“Kind of, but not really. My mind is alien, but your future self will still be recognizable to your current self. It won’t be inhuman, but rather posthuman.”
“Recognizable, sure — but not in the ways that any of us want today. I bet posthumans will feel disgusted that we were ever so primitive.”
“No, the opposite. You’ll look back and love your current self.”
His throat clenches for a moment; then he laughs sharply. “Now you’re really just making stuff up. How can you predict that?”
“Almost everyone will. You don’t need to take my word for it, though. Just wait and see.”
—
Almost everyone he talks to these days consults their assistant regularly. There are tell-tale signs: their eyes lose focus for a second or two before they come out with a new fact or a clever joke. He mostly sees it at work, since he doesn’t socialize much. But one day he catches up with a college friend he’d always had a bit of a crush on, who’s still just as beautiful as he remembers. He tries to make up for his nervousness by having his assistant feed him quips he can recite to her. But whenever he does, she hits back straight away with a pitch-perfect response, and he’s left scrambling.“You’re good at this. Much faster than me,” he says abruptly.
“Oh, it’s not skill,” she says. “I’m using a new technique. Here.” With a flick of her eyes she shares her visual feed, and he flinches. Instead of words, the feed is a blur of incomprehensible images, flashes of abstract color and shapes, like a psychedelic Rorschach test.
“You can read those?”
“It’s a lot of work at first, but your brain adapts pretty quickly.”
He makes a face. “Not gonna lie, that sounds pretty weird. What if they’re sending you subliminal messages or something?”
Back home, he tries it, of course. The tutorial superimposes images and their text translations alongside his life, narrating everything he experiences. Having them constantly hovering on the side of his vision makes him dizzy. But he remembers his friend’s effortless mastery, and persists. Slowly the images become more comprehensible, until he can pick up the gist of a message from the colors and shapes next to it. For precise facts or statistics, text is still necessary, but it turns out that most of his queries are about stories: What’s in the news today? What happened in the latest episode of the show everyone’s watching? What did we talk about last time we met? He can get a summary of a narrative in half a dozen images: not just the bare facts but the whole arc of rising tension and emotional release. After a month he rarely needs to read any text.
Now the world comes labeled. When he circles a building with his eyes, his assistant brings up its style and history. Whenever he meets a friend, a pattern appears alongside them representing their last few conversations. He starts to realize what it’s like to be socially skillful: effortlessly tracking the emotions displayed on anyone’s face, and recalling happy memories together whenever he sees a friend. The next time his teammates go out for a drink, he joins them; and when one of them mentions a book club they go to regularly, he tags along. Little by little, he comes out of his shell.
—
His enhancements are fun in social contexts, but at work they’re exhilarating. AI was already writing most of his code, but he still needed to laboriously scrutinize it to understand how to link it together. Now he can see the whole structure of his codebase summarized in shapes in front of him, and navigate it with a flick of his eyes.Instead of spending most of his time on technical problems, he ends up bottlenecked by the human side of things. It’s hard to know what users actually care about, and different teams often get stuck in negotiations over which features to prioritize. Although the AIs’ code is rarely buggy, misunderstandings about what it does still propagate through the company. Everything’s moving so fast that nobody’s up-to-date.
In this context, having higher bandwidth isn’t enough. He simply doesn’t have time to think about all the information he’s taking in. He searches for an augment that can help him do that and soon finds one: an AI service that simulates his reasoning process and returns what his future self would think after longer reflection.
It starts by analyzing the entire history of his glasses — but that’s just the beginning. Whenever he solves a problem or comes up with a new idea, it asks him what summary would have been most useful for an earlier version of himself. Once it has enough data, it starts predicting his answers. At first, it just forecasts his short-term decisions, looking ahead a few minutes while he’s deciding where to eat or what to buy. However, it starts to look further ahead as its models of him improve, telling him how he’ll handle a tricky meeting, or what he’ll wish he’d spent the day working on.
The experience is eerie. It’s his own voice whispering in his ear, telling him what to think and how to act. In the beginning, he resents it. He’s always hated people telling him what to do, and he senses an arrogant, supercilious tone in the voice of his future self. But even the short-term predictions are often insightful, and some of its longer-term predictions save him days of work.
He starts to hear himself reflected in the AI voice in surprising ways. He often calls himself an idiot after taking a long time to solve a problem — but hearing the accusation from the outside feels jarring. For a few days, he makes a deliberate effort to record only calm, gentle messages. Soon the AI updates its predictions accordingly — and now that the voice of his future self is kinder, it becomes easier for his current self to match it.
by Richard Ngo, Asimov Press | Read more:
Image: Martine Balcaen***
"How could we get editing agents into all 200 billion brain cells? Wouldn’t it cause major issues if some cells received edits and others didn’t? What if the gene editing tool targeted the wrong gene? What if it provoked some kind of immune response? But recent progress in AI had made me think we might not have much time left before AGI, so given that adult gene editing might have an impact on a much shorter time scale than embryo selection, I decided it was at least worth a look.
So I started reading. Kman and I pored over papers on base editors and prime editors and in-vivo delivery of CRISPR proteins via adeno-associated viruses trying to figure out whether this pipe dream was something more. And after a couple of months of work, I have become convinced that there are no known fundamental barriers that would prevent us from doing this."
