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God-Like AI And The Decentralized Internet

When we talk about “god-like AI” what we really mean probably has to do with the convergence of trends that will supercharge these models and agents beyond what we can keep up with. In other words, AI may become so capable that as its contemporaries, we may end up being a little like cavepeople in the early world, less able to control and outthink other sentient forces in our environment.

If all of this sounds esoteric, we can get a bit more of a real-world flavor from Ramesh Raskar who runs classes here at MIT on the future of AI (he’s also head of the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture research group.) He presents a sort of AI mythology, if you will, that you can think of as maybe similar to the ancient Greek or Roman or Norse formulations, in its treatment of forces beyond our full understanding.

Raskar talks about being “the voice of God” in a hotline setup back in the landline days, but connects that to our current awareness of what AI is doing in our world, contending:

“What we really need is a trusted, honest, impartial broker – the definition of God – we need a newfangled AI, a god-like AI, to do that orchestration.”

I found his examples interesting. You have Google Maps as the “God of traffic” and ChatGPT as the “God of Public Information,” but also, Raskar suggests, we might want even more connected “gods” involved.

“What we need,” he says, “is that deep-down information that’s hidden well below the surface.”

What else could we have? Maybe Dall-E, the “God of art” and Amazon the “God of instant delivery”.

Or, as Raskar notes, entities that can use a decentralized Internet to, say, sell products or find cures for diseases.

I thought about his analysis of two big trends that are unlocking potential for god-like AI: one is ubiquitous compute, which I think many would agree we have in the age after Moore’s Law, and the other is the proliferation of personal agents, AI entities that will do our bidding, or at least do things on our behalf. To quote Raskar:

“When you take these two trends and intersect them, suddenly AI can start thinking like a scientist.”

As for the personal agents:

“We can wait for them to become smarter and smarter, like what we’re doing now, or we can take these simple agents and let them start talking to each other.”

Here’s the acronym that Raskar gives to explain the workings of the “deux ex machina” – Global Orchestration of Decentralized AI – (which kind of reminds me of the other acronym Guaranteed Overnight Delivery).

In terms of privacy, as he notes, we’ll have to embrace a certain flavor of pseudo-anonymous delivery in order to facilitate these techniques.

Another idea I thought was relevant is the study of incentives on data markets: how do you get people to participate? Raskar breaks down a system called “CrowdX” which relies on orchestration, discovery, visualization and decision support.

We’ve got smart people working on it!

When I think about the future of the decentralized Internet, and how it differs from buzzwords related to crypto and defi, I think about how each of these utilities may someday become a god unto itself – as Raskar explains, with a bit of a history of regional pantheism.

I think Marvin Minsky would have agreed: we will not have ONE AI god, but a series of them. What that means is yet to be determined.

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