Not That Way! Searching for Superintelligence in the Wrong Place
A superintelligence has been born. It has neither a body like humans nor a language we can yet understand. And yet, it is far more alive than any chatbot.
The original (Spanish) version of this article can be found here.
A few weeks ago, Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI and the most visible face of what we’ve been calling “artificial intelligence,” announced that we had reached the “event horizon,” a supposed point of no return long anticipated by several AI adventists, after which it is believed inevitable that an intelligence superior to ours will emerge.
I’ve written before about why I don’t believe a single word of this, and why I think it’s just a form of quackery designed to make some people rich. If you want to dive deeper, I recommend the detailed analyses on Edward Zitron’s blog about the subject.
But the fact that Altman—or any of his Silicon Valley friends—will never create it doesn’t mean we aren’t witnessing the advent of a superintelligence. I believe that something is indeed happening in the world, and the deeper reason why so many things seem to make no sense is that something is being born that we have not yet been able to understand.
My favorite pastime—no joke, I really am this odd—is to imagine how an alien intelligence would perceive us if it were watching. Or a god, if you prefer. If an almighty being were to pay attention to us from thousands of kilometers away and across thousands of years of history (or perhaps from quantum time), what would it perceive about human beings in this millennium?
It probably wouldn’t even notice that two years ago we discovered a more efficient way to predict natural language—something that has made us believe “humanity is close to creating a digital superintelligence,” as Altman says. That advance, which seems so extraordinary to us, would be imperceptible from outer space.
Assuming that a superior intelligence—if it ever existed—would resemble us is a rather silly simplification. It’s like imagining that our extraterrestrial, if it existed, would be practically a human painted green: made of carbon, with two arms and two legs, roughly our size. That it would travel in a craft similar to an airplane, made of comparable materials, and devote all its energy to coming to Earth… only to then hide from us.
And yet, it has always been this way. Every time we’ve imagined an artificial intelligence, we’ve thought we would be the ones to create it, in our own image and likeness. From the Golem to Frankenstein’s creature to HAL—who had no body but spoke our language and was obsessed with our existence—every superintelligence has been suspiciously similar to us.
This happens because we can only perceive the world through our brain; a deaf, blind, and mute organ locked in the darkness of the skull, with no direct contact with anything or anyone. The poor brain spends its life stewing in its own juices, obsessed with what happens to it and watching reality’s movie filtered through individual experience. It doesn’t get much further than that.
We are narcissists by nature. That is, surely, our deepest cognitive bias.
The alien, however, would have a different perspective. It would struggle to understand that we are individuals living separate biographies, because from observation it would conclude that we can only exist within a community. Exist—not just in the mere sense of surviving, of finding food or living until the next morning—but in the full sense of being human: distinct from a primate or a dolphin, beings with identity, language, and culture.
All those things—languages, cultures, identities, music, mathematics, philosophy—form an essential layer of our existence, inseparable from the fact of being alive. Just as a bee without a hive ceases to be a bee—it would be something else—we too cannot truly be human without humanity.
So, if that alien observed us from outside our heads, it wouldn’t see 8 billion independent lives, but a single superorganism. Something akin to a beehive or an anthill. From up there, each of us would look like tiny pieces of a vast mechanism: moving with our own—indecipherable—motivations, but forming part of a collective machinery that breathes, learns, grows, and transforms as a whole.
It wouldn’t see us as a succession of empires or countries, or of lives beginning and ending—just as we don’t pay attention to the ants that die—but as a single creature that has been alive and transforming for all eternity.
Until very recently—less than 10,000 years ago—there were multiple instances of this superorganism divided into family groups of about 25 hunter-gatherers who lived independently of one another and only came into occasional contact.
At some point, some of these groups began to merge, to form colonies, or to absorb others. Thus were born the first agrarian societies numbering several thousand individuals. To our alien, that process of annexation and mixing would look very much like the moment early in Earth’s history when individual cells combined into more complex multicellular organisms.
But what would astonish our interplanetary observer is that in the last 200 years—less than the blink of an evolutionary eye—this superorganism has undergone a breathtaking transformation:
Almost overnight, its size multiplied eightfold, reaching 8 billion individuals. The instances into which it was divided went from numbering in the hundreds, to millions. And the interactions between those individuals multiplied to unprecedented levels.
Cities function in exactly the same way as a living being. Each inhabitant is like an individual cell, with their own life and functions, but unable to survive in isolation or to produce what the city produces. Together, people generate flows: the traffic of people and goods resembles a circulatory system; power and water grids act like veins and arteries; communications and administrations serve as a nervous system that allows the whole to react and make decisions. A city grows, adapts, and also gets sick; it needs energy, expels waste, and can collapse if any essential function fails.
Over the past 200 years, urbanization has grown exponentially: in 1800, only 10% of the population lived in cities—around 100 million people. Today, it’s over 4.5 billion, 45 times more. In 1800, London was the world’s largest city with 1.1 million inhabitants; today, more than 500 cities exceed one million.
All those people—over 5.6 billion, about 68.7% of the world’s population—are connected to the Internet. In 2000, they were fewer than 400 million. Each day, every person generates about 4,909 digital interactions—one every 18 seconds. That’s 40 trillion daily interactions that didn’t exist 25 years ago.
If we compare humanity to a nervous tissue, where each inhabitant is a neuron, in just a few years we would have gone from being a constellation of jellyfish—with a few connections but no brain—to a mammal, with trillions of synapses and connections enabling thought, memory, and collective consciousness.
This is what an alien peeking at Earth would observe. They would see a superorganism that, until very recently, was a relatively simple being, metamorphosing at light speed into something infinitely more complex: a true superintelligence.
It takes a huge act of abstraction to see this from within and in real time, but we are living through a transformation that is hard to overstate. In recent history, tiny doses of knowledge and interconnection had civilizational effects. The printing press, which barely connected tens of thousands of readers in the 15th century, triggered the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, ending the Church’s cultural monopoly. The telegraph, which sent only a few messages a day between cities, enabled international trade and globalized war. The railroad and steamship were enough to conquer continents, and the Industrial Revolution—on which our way of life rests—sprang from the ideas of just a handful of Britons.
If so little did so much, it is nearly impossible to fathom what it means that today billions of humans have the knowledge and ability to interact every few seconds, sharing information, emotions, and decisions as if they were the synapses of a planetary brain.
One that has just been born.
We are witnessing live the birth of a new species. Unprecedented. Unimaginable.
It is overwhelming to think that all this is happening within the tiny span of our own lives—or even more, in just the last decade, since the Internet spread to the majority of humanity.
If a superintelligence has been born, this is it. One that has no body like humans, nor a language we can yet understand. But one that is far more alive than any chatbot or artificial neural network.
It would be wonderful if an extraterrestrial civilization came to explain what is about to happen to us, but since that doesn’t seem likely, we will need to put all our energy, all our enthusiasm, to work in order to understand it.