God Machines
If someone asks you what color you like, you may say it is blue. You may not think as to why that is the case. May be you like blue skies or blue ocean. You may be from a sea side town or you are someone who is living in the mountains and you get to see clear blue skies. Something should have influenced you to say it is ‘blue’.
Similarly our food choices, the language we speak, the clothes we wear, the friends we have are all influenced by where we live, the school you went, the type of friends you had etc.
We are a product of our environment largely.
That’s probably why when you watch a movie and see the villain, they always end up looking somewhat similar. The heroes have similar facial features. You immediately gather a dislike for the villain just by seeing him. There may be very few cases where the villain may look like a normal man, unusual to be casted as a villain. But those movies are the outliers and mostly cater to specific audiences.
This is the reason why we end up having a similar life as many others who have the same taste. People who have similar likes end up going after similar things. And when you go after the same goal, you can pretty much guess the obstacles they will encounter.
A person who is worried about the law and order either on the positive or negative side will most likely try to become a politician, police, lawyer or an activist. It is easy to tell what they will likely encounter in their pursuit and how their life is going to be.
Even though we all look different, with different tastes, we are similar to many others. We actually belong to groups that can be labeled by some attributes.
This grouping is often fluid. Your likes change over time. You may be someone who was garrulous and you may have turned silent over time. You may be someone who was an eccentric and may have sobered down. All this character changes in you also impacts what you like. When you were eccentric, you might have liked Jim Carrey and now you may like to watch characters in an Iranian movie.
The time in which you change your likes need not be very long. What you would have liked an year ago, you may find it uninteresting now. Again it is due the environment we are in.
Sciences that try to predict your behavior, your future can do it if they know your past. Everyone leaves a trail behind and if you can gather all the nitty gritty and feed them into a giant neural network, it is possible to predict your future.
We are all travelling in different paths in our lives, crossing one another and changing directions similar to the dust particles randomly moving and colliding with one another when light is shone. We are just a little bit bigger in size.
All of this surely makes us question ‘free will’. Is there one such thing, when you are following a path that can be predicted, provided all the environment variables that determine this path are known?
If this giant neural network can tell you your future accurately, it surely means your path is known and there is no ‘free will’.
That depends on how far and how accurately it can predict your future. Suppose it is 95% accurate and has 5% error in its predictions, then the ‘free will’ can be said to be 5%.
Free will exists only if you don’t know what beholds your future. You think the path you are traveling is unique and unknown. But what if you come to know that the path you travelled and going to take can be shown on a giant map of ‘life’ and no matter what you do to change that prediction, you end up there.
If you come to know you are just a path traced on such a map, you will become silent and end up doing the job in front of you just like a person who is undergoing life sentence. Oh, what a tragedy that would be. Life with its myriad of colors will suddenly begin to work on the grey scale.
We will be no different from the ‘intelligent machines’ we are trying to build. Ironically, if you just accept this life as ‘fully known’, you will never try new paths. The unknown in front of us makes all of us as explorers creating fascinating trails. If we stop exploring, the need to predict also will die as we accept that everything about us is known already. This means we can’t feed the neural machine with new possibilities to learn.
If people realize that all their actions can be foretold accurately by this neural network, then, they will slowly begin to surrender themselves to this new machine. They may in fact go to the extent of consulting this machine as to what is the most appropriate thing to do next. This machine will look like what man is doing today with God.
All our forays into AI is possibly to find this God machine. And implicitly we are doing this to fix an upper bound to the unknowns we face in our lives. We want to have a happy living broadly which means there are less unknowns, but with a margin of error with small uncertainties strewn in between.
It is also possible that even when such a God machine exists and is able to predict your future, a lot of us will try to defy its predictions by doing things differently, just like how we give crazy inputs to break an AI like the GPT3.
This quality of us is exactly ‘free will’. Our urge to defy knowns and tread the unknown taking different paths. We won’t be here today but for those explorers who tried things differently. Human brain always raises the bar whenever it is challenged.
As long as we preserve our maverick side of things, we will always be unpredictable even for God machines.