Postpartum Singularities
A metaphor for the coming emergence of higher order phenomena
N.b. I am not, and have never been, pregnant. Forgive my ignorance in this matter.
It seems clear now that something is coming. Whispers spread through the crowd, speaking of silicon gods and trend lines, inevitable trajectories made from market forces, something we cannot see speeding at us from just around the corner. They whisper that the time is right. So I will propose a metaphor, one that is foreign to my experience but seems to me poetically apt.
Perhaps we are, as a society, collectively gestating something foreign within us. This gestation was once borne of human desire, but is now fuelled by complex macroscale and microscale processes that we cannot fully comprehend, much less interfere with. To say that we can choose to delay the birth of this new entity is the same as saying that a pregnant woman is in control of her body, so she can choose to delay her labour. To stop the birth now would require drastic interventions that might greatly harm both society in general and the new entity we are creating, possibly irreversibly.1
Beginnings are delicate things. We cannot predict at what moment we will go into labour and in what precise state we will find ourselves when it does. Perhaps the mother is at home, healthy and satiated. Perhaps a sudden shock catches her unawares, triggering a sudden birth. Perhaps she is in a life or death struggle when the movements begin.
What then should we do?
They say that the most dangerous time for a mother and her child alike are the moments, days, and weeks immediately after giving birth2. The mother has been grievously exerted and suffered enormous pain, the child has been freshly released into a new and foreign environment entirely unlike that of the womb. In some sense, a vast amount of stored anxiety and pent up energy has been released, which could drastically reshape everything and everyone as we reconsider our lives, our priorities, and our set ways of doing things. Our job, then, is to be vigilant and aware, ready to spring into action, whenever the birth comes. And then stand in active vigil as both mother and child recuperate, to watch out for sudden and disastrous developments.
Beginnings are delicate things. Let us not be caught unawares.
To draw out the analogy: aborting/stopping AI development at this point would require an incredibly intensive compute monitoring regime, an international moratorium on algorithm research (to stop AI technology from being viable below whatever the minimum compute threshold is set at), and also probably very heavy handed policing of the internet and the tech industry by international governments. Effectively, an entire swathe of the global tech industry would be wiped out with billions of dollars in investment lost. Perhaps this is the best path or the safest path, and there are groups trying to do this, but I do not fancy their chances. (In addition, success in this level of arms control increases the chance that the first AGI created is an open sourced or unmonitored one developed by parties even less responsible than the current AGI labs, which I don’t see as a good sign)
From Wikipedia: “The World Health Organization (WHO) describes the postnatal period as the most critical and yet the most neglected phase in the lives of mothers and babies; most maternal and newborn deaths occur during this period.” For the child arguably a greater risk is immediately after conception, when up to a third of potential foetuses are lost, but in our analogy it appears that we are quite far now from the time when AI could be dismissed as an idle flight of fancy.