Mitä meistä tulee?

Varastin otsikon Antti Kasviolta, hänen etukäteisarvostelusta Yuval Hararin kirjasta Homo Deus. Sama kysymys nousi taas esiin Juan Enriquezin TED-puheesta Will our kids be a different species? ja erityisesti sen nykyihmisen aivoja käsittelevästä osuudesta. Alla keskeiset kohdat:

12:41
And as you think about it, let me close with an example of the brain. The first place where you would expect to see enormous evolutionary pressure today, both because of the inputs, which are becoming massive, and because of the plasticity of the organ, is the brain.

12:58
Do we have any evidence that that is happening? Well let's take a look at something like autism incidence per thousand. Here's what it looks like in 2000. Here's what it looks like in 2002, 2006, 2008. Here's the increase in less than a decade. And we still don't know why this is happening. What we do know is, potentially, the brain is reacting in a hyperactive, hyper-plastic way, and creating individuals that are like this. And this is only one of the conditions that's out there. You've also got people with who are extraordinarily smart, people who can remember everything they've seen in their lives, people who've got synesthesia, people who've got schizophrenia. You've got all kinds of stuff going on out there, and we still don't understand how and why this is happening.

Sitten hän esittelee joitakin teorioita ja viimeisenä:

15:18
The third, is this too much information? We're trying to process so much stuff that some people get synesthetic and just have huge pipes that remember everything. Other people get hyper-sensitive to the amount of information. Other people react with various psychological conditions or reactions to this information. Or maybe it's chemicals.

Ja lopuksi:

15:51
Here's the bottom line. What I think we are doing is we're transitioning as a species. And I didn't think this when Steve Gullans and I started writing together. I think we're transitioning into Homo evolutis that, for better or worse, is not just a hominid that's conscious of his or her environment, it's a hominid that's beginning to directly and deliberately control the evolution of its own species, of bacteria, of plants, of animals. And I think that's such an order of magnitude change that your grandkids or your great-grandkids may be a species very different from you.

Autismi siis alkoi yleistyä vuosien 2002 ja 2006 välillä. Aika sopivasti vuonna 2004 pidetyssä O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conferencessa popularisoitiin termi Web 2.0, jonka voi tiivistää (wikipedia):

A Web 2.0 website may allow users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to the first generation of Web 1.0-era websites where people were limited to the passive viewing of content.

Ihmisistä tuli siis potentiaaleja tuottajia eikä pelkkiä kuluttajia.

Toinen murros

Toinen murros tapahtui mielestäni reilu vuosi sitten, kun Google alkoi käyttää uutta syväoppimisalgoritmia puheentunnistuksessa reilu vuosi sitten. Sitä ennen vuoden 2016 alussa USA:n kuurojen yhdistys moitti puheentunnistusta käyttökelvottomaksi:

"Since the intelligibility of captioning drops dramatically at even a 2% error rate, most of the time YouTube’s computer generated captions are incomprehensible.  In fact, the automatic captions are sometimes so wrong that they have become a comedic internet sensation, leading to the creation of the hashtag #captionfail."

Keväällä 2017 uusi puheentunnistus oli oppinut jo lähes täydelliseksi. Jopa Sergey Brin, toinen Googlen perustajista, oli hämmästynyt Google X:n aliprojektin Google Brainin kyvyistä. Hän kertoi tästä Davosissa tammikuussa 2017 ensimmäisessä vastauksessaan:

Wired kirjoitti aiheesta jo 2013 How Ray Kurzweil Will Help Google Make the Ultimate AI Brain. Lisää Kurzweilista myöhemmin, mutta ensin kyborgi-antropologi Amber Case, We are all cyborgs now:

00:11
I would like to tell you all that you are all actually cyborgs, but not the cyborgs that you think. You're not RoboCop, and you're not Terminator, but you're cyborgs every time you look at a computer screen or use one of your cell phone devices. So what's a good definition for cyborg? Well, traditional definition is "an organism to which exogenous components have been added for the purpose of adapting to new environments." That came from a 1960 paper on space travel, because, if you think about it, space is pretty awkward. People aren't supposed to be there. But humans are curious, and they like to add things to their bodies so they can go to the Alps one day and then become a fish in the sea the next.

07:09
The most successful technology gets out of the way and helps us live our lives. And really, it ends up being more human than technology, because we're co-creating each other all the time. And so this is the important point that I like to study: that things are beautiful, that it's still a human connection — it's just done in a different way. We're just increasing our humanness and our ability to connect with each other, regardless of geography. So that's why I study cyborg anthropology.

Mihin tämä johtaa?

Ray Kurzweil on ennustanut, että saavutamme singulariteetin vuonna 2045. Wikipedia:

"Teknologinen singulariteetti tarkoittaa tulevaisuudentutkimuksessa hypoteesiä, jossa yli-inhimillinen tekoäly kiihdyttää ihmiskunnan teknologisen kehityksen ja sosiaalisen muutoksen niin nopeaksi, että singulariteettiä edeltäneet ihmiset eivät pysty ymmärtämään tai mielekkäästi ennustamaan tulevaisuutta. Ilmiön nimitys on analogia, joka viittaa modernin fysiikan sääntöjen kaatumiseen lähellä mustan aukon singulariteettia.[1]"

Julkaistu alunperin Turun Yliopiston avoimen yliopiston Moodlessa Tieto- ja viestintätekniikan opetuskäytön projekti -kurssilla.