Getting to Meaningful Causal-Type AI
It has been said that the future of Life is about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and that as AI advances a point will be reached, the Singularity, when humans will no longer have a clue as to what is going on nor why. Essentially as a species, humans will at this point have been marginalized by a global, singular intelligence, whose capabilities far outstrip human intelligence.
I have a different opinion as captured by the philosophical-mathematical exploration in my book, The Second Singularity.
I make the case that the future of Life is enabled by the pre-existent complexity that exists in every iota of it and without deeply understanding complexity theory and how this emerges in Life, AI will have fundamental limits. This trend perhaps relates to the growth of ‘Causal AI’, and to give any causal-type AI deep power, meta-knowledge of the philosophical-mathematical type explored in this book, will have to be considered.
In my estimation this is also where AI’s next generation thinkers, such as Meta’s AI chief Yann LeCun, is going with creation of autonomous AI, similarly based on modeled views of life that may encapsulate ‘common sense’ and other meta-perspectives. Further, without disclosing the identity of the leading company, I will also say that I am currently engaged in ground-breaking working in causal-type AI that promises to have far-reaching impacts. More will be disclosed in the future.
The Second Singularity is part of a ten-book treatise based on the central place that light has in our lives. In a reversal of roles between the electromagnetic spectrum and light, I suggest that the electromagnetic spectrum and numerous other emergent entities in the layers of matter and life, in fact surface from Light. In this point of view there have already been a series of light-based “epiphanies” by virtue of which Life in its continuing complexities has emerged as partial-singularities, and further, will approach a Second Singularity as we consciously open to the fullness of Light.
In 2020 I wrote an IEEE paper Limits of AI as Established by a Multi-Layered Symmetry-Based Model of Light to highlight the implicit power of this other type of singularity, and received the Best Presenter Award for this paper at the IEEE IEMCON conference. This paper suggests how AI itself will need to morph to encapsulate sustainable relevance and power.
In this point of view the future of life cannot be due to AI as it is currently conceived. At best the current type of AI can create a process by which many tasks that usually require utilization of the fundamental light-derived capacity of intelligence in order to be completed, can be completed by an exhaustively repetitive running of algorithms driven by massive computing power, hence giving the illusion of intelligence. Projected forward, the exhaustively repetitive running of algorithms driven by massive computing power, endow a practically ubiquitous digitally-enabled strata to control many tasks, and this may create the phenomenon of a “singularity” — in which humankind effectively cannot even fathom how things are happening anymore and is seemingly outpaced and outthought at every step in every direction by an ‘intelligence’ that appears to be all-knowing, all-present, and all-powerful.
But this kind of singularity is fundamentally separated from the light-based edifice behind all things, and in a series of recent Forbes articles that focus on quantum-devices engineered to tap into life’s complexity, I am proposing a post-LLM quantum-driven approach in which the singularity of the second type can perhaps more easily be approached. I leveraged off the recent xAI initiative aimed to understand the universe, that in some respects appears to have a second singularity type aim, and have summarized the gist of the Forbes articles here:
