INTRODUCTION
This story shows how complex Einstein could be. Not long after his arrival in Princeton, he was invited, by the wife of one of the professors of mathematics at Princeton, to be a guest of honor at a tea. Reluctantly, Einstein consented. After the tea had progressed for a time, the excited hostess, thrilled to have such an eminent guest of honor, fluttered out into the center of activity and with raised arms silenced the group. Bubbling out some words expressing her thrill and pleasure, she turned to Einstein and said: “I wonder, Dr. Einstein if you would be so kind as to explain to my guests in a few words, just what is relativity theory?”
Without any hesitation, Einstein rose to his feet and told a story. He said he was reminded of a walk he one day had with his blind friend. The day was hot and he turned to the blind friend and said:
“I wish I had a glass of milk”.
“Glass”, replied the blind friend, “I know what that is. But what do you mean by milk?”
“Why, milk is a white fluid” explained Einstein.
“Now fluid, I know what that is” said the blind man “but what is white?”
“Oh, white is the color of a swan’s feathers”.
“Feathers, now I know what they are, but what is a swan?”
“A swan is a bird with a crooked neck”.
“Neck, I know what that is, but what do you mean by crooked?”
At this point Einstein said he lost his patience. He seized his blind friend’s arm and pulled it straight “There, now your arm is straight,” he said. Then he bent the blind friend’s arm at the elbow “Now it is crooked”.
“Ah,” said the blind friend “Now I know what milk is”.
And Einstein, at the tea, sat down.
ARTICLE
It is a great paradox that where we all agree that we live in a postindustrial era we still insist to count the revolutionary changes of Society, in a simplistic way, as a series of industrial revolutions 1st, 2nd, 3rd and now 4th, when those revolutionary changes, that have a tremendous impact in our Society and our lives Worldwide, have less and less to do with Industry and more and more to much higher developments in the human quest for progress.
In this essay, we will attempt to put those societal revolutions in their rational order and give them their rational titles to repent the important changes in the human quest for growth from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens.
A Industrial Revolution.
This is the beginning of our modern era.
Principally it is the period when human and animal muscle force was greatly multiplied by the use of manmade Energy (Steam) and the use of increasingly sophisticated machines and machine tools substituting previously human activities, particularly but not only in manufacturing.
Although the first practical steam engine was Newcomen’s steam pump (1712), from its inception it took almost a Century to develop steam engines that had a significant impact on Manufacturing and equally, if not more important, on Transport.
1779: The crank was first applied by James Pickard to a Newcomen engine, producing rotary motion.
The Industrial Revolution can be considered as starting when inventions came to practical use.
Steam-powered milling (1785), Fulton’s steamboat (1806), and Trevithick’s railway locomotive (1803) were all part of the Industrial Revolution.
The History of Technology, like any other History, is best studied as a flow and not in milestones.
Milestones are convenient up to the undergraduate level, so as to make teaching easier.
A blob in the timeline covering a few years is a more representative way to mark great societal changes due to Technology advances.
However, if a date must be fixed for the Industrial Revolution a blob in the Timeline between 1790 and 1810 would be as close as possible one.
B Energy Revolution
Every great change in the World is associated with a qualitative change in Energy sources and use.
The introduction of Steam created the basic triangle of the Industrial Revolution: Steam, Coal, and Iron.
While this was a Great Leap Forward, the evolution of this was much more astoundingly impactful so as to merit the name Energy Revolution.
The Bessemer process patented in 1856 that produced cheap and plentiful steel was the initial driver and in the last quarter of the 19th Century was the main force behind the American Industrial Revolution and the great American railroad network which made possible, after its Civil War, the integration of the United States into one Country. This invention bridged the Industrial Revolution with the Energy Revolution by producing massively quality steel, accessible in price, steel which is still very important today.
In the last quarter of the 19th Century, there was a confluence of a number of Energy evolutionary streams that came together and resulted in a great and multifaceted availability for practical use of various Energy types and sources such as Electrical, Hydrocarbon, ICE, etc., Energy sources and uses, that dramatically improved human life, in terms of lighting, mobility and the ability to construct a series of new, much more sophisticated machines, from electric sewing and washing machines to cranes, lifts and machine tools.
Rockefeller started the Standard Oil Company in 1870.
The Gramme machine was the first usefully powerful electrical motor that was successful industrially (1873).
In 1877 Nicolaus Otto patented a four-stroke internal combustion engine.
In 1879 Edison invented the light bulb.
Thus, the triangle Coal, Iron, and Steam of the Industrial Revolution was replaced by the triangle Oil, Steel, and Internal Combustion Engine.
This was a tremendous qualitative and quantitative change. Oil is by far superior to Coal in terms of extraction, Energy efficiency, ease of handling, and the numerous byproducts that are produced from it.
While Electricity very quickly was developed and adopted worldwide, motor cars lagged but their practical development was achieved in the last quarter of the 19th Century.
Benz presented the first functional automobile in 1886.
To fix a date for the Energy Revolution, a blob in the Timeline between 1875 and 1895 would adequately present this turning point.
C Communication and 3D Transport Revolution
The new element of this period is of course microwaves.
Microwaves made communications possible around the Globe and hence information transfer without investing and maintaining wires, particularly at sea.
Microwaves made radar possible so for the first time it was possible to discern objects beyond the optical line and at night or fog.
The sea which covers 71% of the globe became much safer to navigate for ships that carry the greatest amount of world trade.
The Microwave Revolution started with Marconi’s wireless invention in 1896 and the first radio broadcast in 1906. Hülsmeyer’s Telemobiloscope (primitive radar) was patented on 30 April 1904.
The impact of microwaves in human civilization became significant after the 1st WW which gave a great boost in this technology and enabled real, worldwide wireless communication.
The mechanical means of Transport, mostly using the ICE, saw an explosion of its use.
At the start of the Great War in 1914, the British Army had just 80 trucks and 20 cars in service. These had been augmented by a further 59,490 motor trucks and 33,800 cars and ambulances by the end of the war in 1918.
More important than that, the ICE allowed movement in three directions.
Movement, until the beginning of the 20th Century, was possible only on the surface of the earth.
The Wright brothers starting in 1903 made it possible for Armstrong to step on the moon in 1969.
The Holland VIII submarine (1900) was the blueprint of all submarines.
In 2020 The Chinese submersible Fendouzhe reached one of the deepest spots on the planet, reaching a depth of 10,909 meters.
To put a blob on the timeline marking the Communication and 3D Transport Revolution, 1920 is a good point, because all of the above technologies have converged and were mature enough to have a significant impact in Societal changes.
D The Cognitive Revolution.
We have reached the most significant part of our small-time travel. The Cognitive Revolution.
This Revolution came just in time. Human affairs have reached such a level of Complexity that the human mind alone soon will be unable to manage them and Society is in danger of collapse.
What is needed is a higher level of algorithms software together with a new level of sophistication of available hardware.
Before we enter this extraordinary and fascinating field which is the apex of human achievements up to now (2023) we must make a small but significant remark.
Human ideas were always well in advance of human capabilities. It was often that instruments were not available to serve the ideas.
The ideas of Babbage were sound. The instruments at his disposal did not allow him to exploit his ideas further.
Quoting from Wikipedia: “The Analytical (Babbage)Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete”.
Babbage was never able to complete the construction of any of his machines due to conflicts with his chief engineer and inadequate funding. It was not until 1941 that Konrad Zuse built the first general-purpose computer, Z3, more than a century after Babbage had proposed the pioneering Analytical Engine in 1837.
So, it is today. Tremendous software work has been done worldwide in the field of Artificial Cognition/Artificial Intelligence. However, while the algorithms are very advanced, the tools are still not at the needed level for the full exploitation of their capabilities.
Quantum computing, which is in its infancy provides a lot of hope. When Quantum software will develop so that can fully exploit Quantum hardware which is at present in advance but still needs a lot of development
Until the proper tools are available the human spirit will be ahead of human achievement.
Anyway, even so, it is the defining moment of the future of humanity. Let’s look into it.
Once again, the Cognitive Revolution is the evolution of the accumulation of original steps that at a certain period of time causes a definitive change in societal values, behaviors, and benefits/problems.
The Computer was the basis of the Cognitive Revolution but it is not the Cognitive Revolution. The Cognitive Revolution is based on continuously more sophisticated and elaborate algorithms that try to resemble a human brain and work in a similar way.
One of the assets of the human brain is that it can correlate to past experiences of itself or others.
The same is achieved in the Cognitive algorithms with the use of Big Data.
How well the algorithm can exploit Big Data and come to valid answers to questions that are presented to it is the measure of the success of this algorithm, which is now called Artificial Intelligence.
Although this seems like an empirotechnical way of building knowledge it is the same way that the Homo Erectus is struggling to become Homo Sapiens.
A point must be made here. Ancient Greeks introduced the concept of the proof of the theorem. This is the basis of Logic up to now. Essentially it means that the correct combination of certain specific parameters always leads to the same result. This, axiom-based logic, is being challenged now.
Before going to the most fascinating part of A.I., that of creativity, it is necessary to check the progress of A.I. so far.
To understand any subject, we must first define it. Mid-1950s McCarthy coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” which he would define as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines”.
Definitions
Tech target gives the following definition for A.I.: Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. Specific applications of A.I. include expert systems, natural language processing, speech recognition, and machine vision.
Britannica gives the following definition for A.I.: Artificial intelligence (A.I.), the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings.
Discussing A.I., it is good to remember that Human Intelligence is not uniform either quantitatively or qualitatively. There is also animal intelligence that is expressed in many forms and at various levels of sophistication.
Therefore, it does not make absolute sense to compare Artificial Intelligence with Human Intelligence directly and both are often found to be wrong.
A.I. has already produced some edible fruits but most of it is in sprouts.
As proof of this, it can be mentioned that millions of man-hours of very gifted and talented people have been spent in software and instrument design of self-driving cars and we are still only halfway there while the average Human can be licensed to drive after 20-30 hours of instruction.
To develop smart software to match the above, my learned friend Efthimis Vaiopoulos considers that the only tool available now for this is the application of Deep Learning (and Machine Learning). It is narrow but the only tool available at present to train the machine (encoding step, decoding step)
As Haomiao Huang put it: “There’s a holy trinity in machine learning: models, data, and computers. Models are algorithms that take inputs and produce outputs. Data refers to the examples the algorithms are trained on. To learn something, there must be enough data with enough richness that the algorithms can produce useful output. Models must be flexible enough to capture the complexity in the data. And finally, there has to be enough computing power to run the algorithms”.
It must be noted here that it is certain since humans are involved in the design of the “teaching and learning” methodology of the Machine, errors are included. This is a very important point.
It makes more sense to check A.I. in the execution of well-defined and already verified tasks or concepts.
As A.I. algorithms are written by Humans it is good to remember that Humans make mistakes even in programming and Humans have various biases that can be willingly or unwillingly be included in A.I. algorithms.
As Kyrtin Atreides, COO and a leading researcher at AGI Laboratory put it: “Narrow Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and groups of humans can shift the damage caused by more than 200 different kinds of bias into diluted and obscured new forms, but neither offers the means to overcome the trade-off. Frequently, they make the problem worse by shifting the damage below thresholds of perception and into “unknown unknowns”.
Also, the axiom GIGO is still valid if big data contains erroneous statements.
As my friend and distinguished Cyber specialist Simeon Trimeritis put it: “Who can explain and who can interpret the algorithm to support that the predictions are not biased or discriminatory?”
There will soon be available methods, if they are not there already, to audit A.I. algorithms against known parameters so as to verify their percentage of accuracy because even A.I. algorithms cannot be 100% correct.
ChatGPT the all-new (2022) bright A.I. tool is a case in point.
ChatGPT can answer most questions, can write an essay, and can be, to a certain extent, creative. However, ChatGPT is limited by design not to answer certain topics and can make a number of errors if asked to compose a difficult analysis of an issue.
Students can try to cheat in their exams by using this tool and the job of their examiners is to discern this attempt. It appears that this is done.
Although Traders see A.I. as shaping their future and having the greatest impact on the Financial Markets in the next year, ChatGPT gave only anticipated answers which could be given by experts up to now.
This is not to downgrade this magnificent achievement but to indicate the limits of A.I. today (2023).
The A.I. challenges today.
A-> Learning in its usual human or animal form is mainly by trial and error, transfer of experience, and maybe atavism.
It is obvious that the same methods cannot be applied in A.I. architecture because, for example, we cannot have X thousand car collisions to teach a machine to self-drive cars. It is though required by an evolved form of A.I. to be able to develop initiative, to be able to handle a new situation based on past experience from observations of every type and the collection and storage of big data.
A method(s) of learning by observation must be developed so that machines endowed with A.I. algorithms can observe parts of the existing Universe that start from simpler and go to continuously more sophisticated functions.
It is to be noted here that since we humans have a deficient understanding of the Universe, it will be a very major achievement if machines can understand the Universe better than us by observation only.
B-> Learning is composed of two opposing parameters: Reasoning and empiricism.
The proof of a theorem is reasoning. Gradient learning is empiricism. Combining the two is difficult but necessary to reconcile.
C-> A.I. is expected to be able to handle two different abstract concepts.
Knowledge and Belief. Both are mutually exclusive.
For A.I. to be able to handle this level of challenge and complexity it is required like animals and humans to be able to operate in the abstract and simplify by decomposing complex precepts.
ChatGPT has started to be able to do some of this.
Architects are using an A.I. tool named Midjourney with some impressive results
However, we are still very far away from a machine that can be generative I.e. creative.
As Dr. Demetris Gerogiannis put it “can we expect that A.I. will be a pathfinder in Art and will be able to create a new trend in Art as for example Impressionism?”
Original Art is as much an expression of the subconscious which presupposes a form of conscience.
I believe that this together with a machine with a conscience is the Holy Grail of A.I. and if those concepts will be part of A.I. in the future A.I. This future is very far away.
Some encouragement comes from certain achievements like the one that follows. The painting was done by a machine and got first prize.
To evaluate ChatGPT as Simeon Trimeritis put it: “Human Intelligence has nothing to do compared with a fast processor proposing answers based on indexed multi-terabytes information and multidimensional models. It seems to me that Intelligence in A.I. definition is like an attractive “marketing” definition of its era”.
There cannot be any real creativity in the human sense of the word without an understanding of human neural circuits, the connections, and interactions between groups of neurons that allow us to perceive, express and act on the world around us. When algorithms will be able to do the same then real A.I. will take off.
THE DANGEROUS PART
Nothing boosts Technology as much as War.
War advances Technology by orders of magnitude in relation to peacetime efforts.
Autonomous weaponry is the third revolution in warfare, following gunpowder and nuclear arms.
The last dramatic demonstration of this was the nuclear bomb.
The next one is likely to be A.I.
We already see the application of artificial intelligence (A.I.) to the evolution of war.
We see autonomous weapons to becoming a common, inexpensive way to attack human and material targets on their own.
They are called lethal autonomous weapons systems.
The next step is an autonomous information collecting and decision-making A.I. system that releases a LAWS attack without human intervention other than switching this system on.
Killer robot drone swarm is already a reality. This is a group of autonomous drones that can communicate to achieve a coordinated attack on the enemy using A.I. without human intervention other (at present) then releasing them.
The Pentagon runs a new program called AMASS, for Autonomous Multi-Domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms. The goal: To develop the ability to deploy thousands of autonomous land, sea, and air drones to overwhelm and dominate an enemy’s area defenses.
This is just one case of A.I.-controlled weapons.
A.I. like steel making, microwaves, the internal combustion engine, nuclear energy, and other Technologies from the Industrial Revolution onwards is a general-purpose Technology that is easily adaptable and usable for warfare so that it can dramatically increase the speed and lethality of warfare.
Robot dogs with rocket launchers may well turn up on the battlefield soon and other much more sophisticated robots, that will be more independent of human decision-making, are likely to follow.
So far Weapons including nuclear ones were subject to limitations through international treaties, conventions, and others that have created a rules-based order.
This is not valid for warfare uses of A.I. as the Technology is new and to a significant extent of unknown power.
A comparison can be made between the first development of the Atomic bomb in Los Alamos and its use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There were no rules for using atomic bombs then.
Although far from satisfactory, some rules for the avoidance of nuclear war are in existence now.
There are no such rules for the use of A.I.
Placing vulnerable A.I. systems in contested domains and making them responsible for critical decisions opens the opportunity for disastrous results. At this time, humans must remain responsible for key decisions.
With the collective mistrust of the various Power blocks of the World at present no A.I. control agreements are likely in the near future.
The lack of mutual trust that blocks collective arms-control agreements between World powers is even greater in the case of A.I.
There is a new arms race, now in A.I. development for purposes of warfare.
The real danger is that of the apprentice sorcerer.
Trying to surpass the opponent, A.I. weapons may be released without a full understanding of their power.
As Paul Scharre warns in Foreign Policy, “For each country, the real danger is not that it will fall behind its competitors in A.I. but that the perception of a race will prompt everyone to rush to deploy unsafe A.I. systems. In their desire to win, countries risk endangering themselves just as much as their opponents”.
As the figures above shows Technology from the inception of the Industrial Revolution onwards increased weapon lethality in a vertiginous way.
This was more than 20 years ago. The potential of Technology for destruction now surpasses many times the Globe.
In the world of artificial intelligence, the idea of “Singularity” looms large. This concept describes an A.I. that exceeds human control.
Many A.I. researchers using various metrics are giving estimates varying between some years or some decades.
The up to now very accurate forecaster Ray Kurzweil expects Singularity to be achieved by 2045.
When A.I. will be equal in skills and ability to the best humans, which is called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), then we are in danger of eradicating Human Society as a self-controlling entity.
For the foreseeable future, the interaction between man and machine is the only safe way of using the new tools.
This is a good point to rest the A.I. case.
“By Turing’s standards, machines can now think,” Stephen Mihm writes. “But the only way they have been able to pull off this feat is to become less like machines with rigid rules and more like humans”. He continued: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But is it the machines we need to fear, or ourselves?”
