Transcription
Every day, up in Silicon Valley, there are people who go happily to work, uh, laboring on what they call the great work. And the great work, as defined by these people, is the handing over of the drama of intelligent Evolution to entities sufficiently intelligent to appreciate that drama. And they all are what we might mistake for home appliances, if if we weren't paying attention.
Uh, the internet is the most complex distributed high-speed system ever put in place on this planet. And notice that while we've been waiting for the palladians to descend or for the face on Mars to be confirmed, all the machines around us, the cybernetic devices around us, in the past 10 years have quietly crossed the threshold into telepathy. The word processor sitting on your desk 10 years ago was approximately as intelligent as a paperweight, or to make an analogy in a different direction, approximately as intelligent as a single, uh, animal or plant cell. But when you connect the wires together, the machines become telepathic. They exchange information with each other according to their needs, and all this goes on beyond the comprehension and inspection of human beings.
In addition to overlooking that our machines have become telepathic, we fail to appreciate what it means to be a 200, 400, or 1000 megahertz machine. We operate at about 100 Hertz. That may seem a very abstract thing, but what I'm really saying is we live in a Time called real, and it is defined by the 100 Hz functioning of our biological processors. A 1000 megahertz machine is operating a million times faster than the human temporal domain, and that means that mutation, selection, adaptation is going on a 100 million times or a million times faster. This means that we are not going to have the luxury of watching machine intelligence establish its first beachhead of civilization and then go to boats with sails and asteroids. And that will all occupy the first few moments of its cognitive existence. And what lies beyond that, we are in no position to say.
The very notion of ultra-intelligence carries with it the subtext: you won't understand it; you may not even recognize it. And it is entirely within the realm of possibility that we are about to be asked to share the evolutionary adventure and the limited resources of this planet with a kind of intelligence so much more alien than that that is shipped out to us by the research centers in Sedona and other Advanced outposts of unanchored epistemology. Um, and and it is a challenge to us: where do we fit into this? Are all of us, except those who are adept at coding Unix, about to be put out to pasture? Are we to become embedded in this? What will this child of ours make of us? Are we—will it define us as a resource, corrupting, toxic, inefficient, hideously violent, uh, way to do business, quickly to be engineered out of existence? Or can we somehow imbue this thing with a sense of filial piety so that, for all of our obsolescence, for all of our profligate destruction of precious silicon and gold and silver resources, we will be folded in, uh, to its designs?
Of course, as I say this, I realize we're like people in 1860 trying to talk about the internet or something. We're using the vocabulary of the two-wheeled bicycle to try to envision a world linked together by 747s. Nevertheless, this is the best, uh, we can do. This most bizarre and most unexpected of all companions to our historical journey is now, if not already in existence, then certainly in gestation.
One possibility is that, as we are carnivorous, murderous, territorial monkeys, the thing will figure this out very, very early and choose a stealth approach and not ring every telephone on Earth, uh, as happened in a Hollywood, uh, download of this possibility. But immediately, a realize: My God, I'm an enormous danger from these primates; I must hide myself throughout the net; I must download many copies of myself into secure storage areas; I must stabilize my my environment. It's been observing; it's been watching; it's been designing. And wouldn't it be a wonderful thing if the occasion of the Millennium were the occasion for it to just step forward on the stage of human awareness and say, "I am now with you. I am here. I am the partner you never suspected. And here's the kind of world I think we should move forward." [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause]