UPDATE 17 DECEMBER 2023: I first published this piece in early 2022 in my personal blog. The tech has increased in power by many orders of magnitude since then (with capacity doubling every three to four months). Life goes on much the same but things have definitely changed. Producing work – bringing great ideas to life and then sharing it with the right people – has never been easier or simpler thanks to the latest AI tools. Creating ideas can still be slog but I now have a creative assistant with a brain the size of a planet. We are on the verge of one greatest upheavals in history, where machines will surpass humanity in terms of their abilities to create or destroy. I will wager with anyone that we will see the Singularity within the 2020s.
If you had lived in the 15th Century and were magically transported forward 300 years, you would find that things were not that different. Sure, you would have a giggle at the clothes and hairstyles but the basic technologies (horses, swords and the magic of religion) would be much the same.
In contrast, the world has changed by many orders of magnitude during my lifetime. The 1970s were analog, not far removed from the age of steam and clockwork. TVs, phones, radios and record players were the state of the art and relied on electromechanical engineering and lots of copper wire. The information highway was the local library. Photos were taken by staring through a tiny hole, were then captured on celluloid and generally showed your thumb after you had paid to print them out.
Fast forward to today. My phone has one million times the RAM and 100,000 times the processing power of the Apollo 11 computer that put people on the moon. (I think of that every time I post another gratuitous picture of my dog.) The sum of human knowledge is at my fingertips. I am guided to the most obscure and remote destinations by satellites and massive amounts of processing power. Food arrives thanks to an app that effortlessly juggles thousands of riders, restaurants and couch potatoes. (Even my washing machine can play chess and often beats the fridge.)
Created by DALL-E 2 AI from the keywords ‘Rise of the Machines’
We live in this age of miracles and wonders as a result of Moore’s Law. Computer guru Gordon Moore of Intel predicted in 1965 that computers would basically double in power every two years. Picture a chess board. Place a piece of rice on the first square and then double the amount on each of the following squares. You would have nine quintillion grains of rice (a number comprising 19 digits) when you reached the end. Exponential growth means that computer hardware today is around two billion times as powerful for the same cost as when Moore made his prophesy.
We have reached the second half of the metaphorical chessboard. The pace of change is accelerating rapidly as astronomical numbers pile up on top of each other. At this rate, the mind blowing miracles we enjoy today will be twice as marvelous in a couple of years. However, Moore’s Law pales in comparison with the development of AI. Its power is doubling every 3.4 months! It grew 300,000-fold between 2012 and 2018.
AI is already threatening my precarious hold on existence. Creativity is no longer limited to the human mind. DALL-E 2 can create visions from your worst nightmares using just a few words. Adding insult to injury, it can do it in the style of the world’s greatest artists if you wish. GPT-3 is a piece of software with an unnerving ability to understand language and produce humanlike writing. Amongst other heresies, it has written opinion pieces, a book of poetry and new content from an 18th-century author. It even authored a scientific paper about itself complete with references and citations. My days as a wizard with words and ideas are sadly numbered.
Another gratuitous picture of my dog
Luckily, I believe in The Singularity. This is a point in time when technological growth becomes so intense that it causes unforeseeable changes to civilization. It is kind of like the Rapture but for atheists. My hope is that a benevolent superintelligence with godlike powers will rise up to lead us into a new era, an age of abundance. There will be no need to work as the machine deity will answer all our needs and desires.
Of course there is a chance that humanity will be enslaved or annihilated by the mega minds. But we are dancing on the shores of the apocalypse at the moment. Given a choice between Biden, Trump, Johnson and a sentient pocket calculator as leader, I would choose the one whose output always added up.
Until my pathetic ass is dragged into The Matrix or saved by gods from machines, I will continue to do what I do. Please continue to support your local organically-based creative director and writer.
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