We fear the dark
Our fear of the dark has ancient roots. Imagine our primate ancestors roaming the savannahs and surving the nights' predators with their overpowering speed, strength, and fangs. What did we have to survive but eachother and our intelligence?
The dark is a beast. It creeps, it crawls, it promises monsters. It's the unknown, vast and hungry. You hear rustles, creaks, shadows dancing in the corners of your vision. Your mind, a fertile ground for fear, plants a garden of terrors.
Then, the click. A tiny burst of light, a defiant pinprick against the blackness. The flashlight beam is a sword, cutting through the darkness. The monsters retreat, revealed as mere shadows, illusions born of fear. The world, once a terrifying abyss, becomes a place to explore with vast new vistas to discover. The unknown is tamed.
My hope in writing this book is to shed light on some fundamental mysteries and to help alleviate our fears so humanity can forge an incredible new path!
Lightbulb moment: Synthetic Intelligence (SI) be can our new electricity
In the book, I explain that LLMs are amazing. They're not perfect and I write sbout that in the book, too.
What I didnt have a chance to include in the book is that SI can be our new electricity. Our civilization would be unimaginable without electricity: no lights, no refrigerators, no microwaves, no computers, no TVs, no phones... we'd give up almost everything we rely on everyday!
Just as electricity became the foundation for countless technologies, from light bulbs to computers, SI can serve as a catalyst for groundbreaking discoveries across various fields. However, we must prioritize safety in developing something so history-changing!
In the book, I prescribe three things in order to design SI thats is 100% human-aligned, explainable, understable and affordanle to all. To recap, those are:
Build in foresight (imagination) and memory
Use a Hiearchical Probablilistic Graph Model approach
Scale or throttle imagination to control cost
Even more safety
To build even more safety, I propose a 4th ingredient: throttle capabilities. For exammple, if want to avoid building SkyNet then don’t give a machine that capability. In the Terminator movies, SkyNet was put in charge of a nation’s nuclear arsenal. In my mind, that’s an obvious unsafe design! We have decades of engineering safety experience to inform this crucial issue. In my view, it should be top of mind as we develop and commit to SI.
Another example, the United Kingdom has, arguably, has the safest designed electrical plug. Why? Because they have more safety features built in to prevent accidental electrocution. First, if a child wants to poke an outlet, the outlets are blocked by a shutter which are closed default and only open when a a plug is attached to the outlet. Second, the neutral and live leads of the plug have a plastic insulation over half of them, so you can’t put your fingers on a live wire while its plugged in. Lastly, each plug has a built-in fuse which usually means each appliance has a fuse. Fuses are better for appliances than circuit-breakers that generally only protect rooms.
Lastly, it's difficult to imagine life without electricity. It's a fundamental part of our infrastructure, powering our homes, businesses, and transportation systems. In the same way, SI is poised to become an indispensable tool, shaping our future in ways we can only begin to imagine. As we continue to explore its potential, it's imperative to approach SI with both excitement, pragmatism, and caution to manifest an incredible future for our kind while avoiding nightmares becoming reality.
TLDR: Throttle SI capabilities for extra safety
