The Age of AI: And Our Human Future (Kissinger, Henry A; Schmidt, Eric; Huttenlocher, Daniel)
Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.
Kissinger, Henry A, Schmidt, Eric, and Huttenlocher, Daniel. The Age of AI: And Our Human Future (English Edition). Little, Brown and Company, 2021.
These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!
An indispensable read on a technology that has already changed our world, transforming how humans understand reality and our role within it. If you think that you can leave this for younger people, remember that Henry Kissinger, at 100 years old, considered it important enough to write a book about it.
Preface
It is an enabler of many industries and facets of human life:
The outcome will be the alteration of human identity and the human experience of reality
CHAPTER 1 Where We Are
AlphaZero’s style was entirely the product of AI training: creators supplied it with the rules of chess, instructing it to develop a strategy to maximize its proportion of wins to losses. After training for just four hours by playing against itself, AlphaZero emerged as the world’s most effective chess program. As of this writing, no human has ever beaten
Even after the antibiotic was discovered, humans could not articulate precisely why it worked. The AI did not just process data more quickly than humanly possible; it also detected aspects of reality humans have not detected, or perhaps cannot detect.
AI promises to transform all realms of human experience. And the core of its transformations will ultimately occur at the philosophical level, transforming how humans understand reality and our role within it.
AI will usher in a world in which decisions are made in three primary ways: by humans (which is familiar), by machines (which is becoming familiar), and by collaboration between humans and machines (which is not only unfamiliar but also unprecedented).
As AI’s role in defining and shaping the “information space” grows, its role becomes more difficult to anticipate. In this space, as in others, AI sometimes operates in ways even its designers can only elaborate in general terms.
AlphaZero is illustrative. It proved that AI, at least in gaming, was no longer constrained by the limits of established human knowledge.
That current human-machine partnership requires both a definable problem and a measurable goal is reason not to fear all-knowing, all-controlling machines;
CHAPTER 2 How We Got Here: Technology and Human Thought
Throughout three centuries of discovery and exploration, humans have interpreted the world as Kant predicted they would according to the structure of their own minds. But as humans began to approach the limits of their cognitive capacity, they became willing to enlist machines—computers—to augment their thinking in order to transcend those limitations.
we have reached a tipping point: we can no longer conceive of some of our innovations as extensions of that which we already know.
digitization has rendered human thought both less contextual and less conceptual. Digital natives do not feel the need, at least not urgently, to develop concepts that, for most of history, have compensated for the limitations of collective memory. They can (and do) ask search engines whatever they want to know, whether trivial, conceptual, or somewhere in between. Search engines, in turn, use AI
to respond to their queries. In the process, humans delegate aspects of their thinking to technology. But information is not self-explanatory; it is context-dependent. To be useful—or at least meaningful—it must be understood through the lenses of culture and history. When information is contextualized, it becomes knowledge. When knowledge compels convictions, it becomes wisdom.
The digital world has little patience for wisdom; its values are shaped by approbation, not introspection. It inherently challenges the Enlightenment proposition that reason is the most important element of consciousness.
applied to more elements of our lives, it is altering the role that our minds have traditionally played in shaping, ordering, and assessing our choices and actions.
CHAPTER 3 From Turing to Today -and Beyond
Turing sidestepped centuries of philosophical debate on the nature of intelligence. The “imitation game” he introduced proposed that if a machine operated so proficientely that observers could not distinguish it from a human’s, the machine should be labelled as intelligent. The Turing test was born.
Shifting our focus in defining intelligence to performance (intelligent-seeming behaviour) rather than the term’s deeper philosophical, cognitive or neuroscientific dimensions.
To enable machine learning, what mattered was the overlap between various representations of a thing, not its ideal- in philopsohical terms, Wittgenstein, not Plato. The modern fileld of machine learning - of programs that learn through experience- was born.
As of this writing, three forms of machine learning are noteworthy: supervised learning, unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning.
Machine-learning methods have taken AI from beating human chess experts to discovering entirely new chess strategies. And its capacity for discovery is not limited to games.
contemporary machine-learning AIs largely model reality on their own.
As of this writing, AI is constrained in three ways. First, the code sets the paramenters of the AI’s possible actions. Second, AI is constrained by its objective function, which defines and assigns what is to optimize. Finally and most obviously, AI can only process inputs that it is designed to recognize and analyze.
CHAPTER 4 Global Network Platforms
mistaking the issue by assuming that AI’s culmination will be to act like individual humans.
Although in principle most network platforms are content-agnostic, in some situations their community standards become as influential as national laws.
In 2015, Google’s search team moved from using these human-developed algorithms to implementing machine learning.
Humans can still guide and adjust the search engine, but they may not be able to explain why one particular page is ranked higher than another. To achieve greater convenience and accuracy, human developers have had to willingly forgo a measure of direct understanding.
Strategists need to consider the lessons of prior eras. They should not assume that total victory is possible in each commercial and technological contest. Instead, they should recognize that prevailing requires a definition of success that a society can sustain over time. This, in turn, requires answering the kinds of questions that eluded political leaders and strategic planners during the Cold War era: What margin of superiority will be required? At what point does superiority cease to be meaningful in terms of performance? What degree of inferiority would remain meaningful in a crisis in which each side used its capabilities to the fullest?
CHAPTER 5 Security and World Order
FOR AS LONG as history has been recorded, security has been the minimum objective of an organized society.
Observing the first nuclear weapons test in the deserts of New Mexico, the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb, was moved to invoke not the strategic maxims of Clausewitz but a line from Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
every nuclear power confronting a nonnuclear opponent has reached the same conclusion, even when facing defeat at the hands of its nonnuclear foe.
In our era, these calculations have entered a new realm of abstraction. This transformation includes so-called cyber weapons, a class of weapons involving dual-use civilian capabilities so that their status as weapons is ambiguous.
Even one of the most famous instances of cyber-enabled industrial sabotage—the Stuxnet disruption of manufacturing control computers used in Iranian nuclear efforts— has not been formally acknowledged by any government.
Cyber arms-control negotiators (which do not yet exist) will need to solve the paradox that discussion of a cyber weapon’s capability may be one and the same with its forfeiture (permitting the adversary to patch a vulnerability) or its proliferation (permitting the adversary to copy the code or method of intrusion).
Uncertainty over the nature, scope, or attribution of a cyber action may render seemingly basic factors a matter of debate—such as whether a conflict has begun, with whom or what the conflict engages, and how far up the escalation ladder the conflict between the parties may be.
The introduction of nonhuman logic to military systems and processes will transform strategy.
AI’s capacity for autonomy and separate logic generates a layer of incalculability.
Generative AI can create vast amounts of false but plausible information. AI-facilitated disinformation and psychological warfare, including the use of artificially created personae, pictures, videos, and speech, is poised to produce unsettling new vulnerabilities, particularly for free societies.
These issues must be considered and understood before intelligent systems are sent to confront one another.
An autonomous system may have a human “on the loop,” monitoring its activities passively, or “in the loop,” with human authorization required for certain actions.
Three qualities have traditionally facilitated the separation of military and civilian domains: technological differentiation, concentrated control, and magnitude of effect.
six primary tasks in the control of their arsenals.
First, leaders of rival and adversarial nations must be prepared to speak to one another regularly,
Second, the unsolved riddles of nuclear strategy must be given new attention and recognized for what they are—one of the great human strategic, technical, and moral challenges.
Third, leading cyber and AI powers should endeavor to define their doctrines and limits
Fourth, nuclear-weapons states should commit to conducting their own internal reviews of their command-and-control and early warning systems.
Fifth, countries—especially the major technological ones—should create robust and accepted methods of maximizing decision time during periods of heightened tension and in extreme situations.
Finally, the major AI powers should consider how to limit continued proliferation of military AI or whether to undertake a systemic nonproliferation effort
CHAPTER 6 AI and Human Identity
To the two traditional ways by which people have known the world, faith and reason, AI adds a third.
But this collaboration will require humans to adjust to a world in which our reason is not the only—and perhaps not the most informative—way of knowing or navigating reality.
We may find ourselves one step closer to the concept of pure knowledge, less limited by the structure of our minds and the patterns of conventional human thought.
CHAPTER 7 AI and the Future.
As printed books became widely available, the relationship between individuals and knowledge changed.
At the civilizational level, foregoing AI will be infeasible. Leaders will have to confront the implications of the technology, for whose application they bear significant responsibility.
The need for an ethic that comprehends and even guides the AI age is paramount. But it cannot be entrusted to one discipline or field.
At every turn, humanity will have three primary options: confining AI, partnering with it, or deferring to it.
An AI ethic is essential.
Human intelligence and artificial intelligence are meeting, being applied to pursuits on national, continental and even global scales. Understanding this transition, and developing a guiding ethic for it, will require commitment and insight from many elements of society: scientists and strategists, statesmen and philosophers, clerics and CEOs. This commitment must be made within nations and among them. Now is the time to define both our parnership with artificial intelligence and the reality that will result.
Afterword: A New Reality.
Continued advances in AI models, visual models, and other specialized models will result in AI that graduates from acting as our assistant to serving as our interlocutors and collaborators.
As AIs become story-tellers and co-creators of our videos, online content will become more entertaining and more prolific, but it will also make it increasingly difficult to distinguish human experession from that of machines. This may call for an AI definition of freedom of speech and expression that distinguishes between utterances originated by humans and utterances by machines.
This new intelligence and its different form of logic will change human perception of reality, as AlphaZero’s new intelligence is changing human perception of chess.
The roles of history, morality, justice, and human judgment in such a world are unclear. AI will lead human beings to realms that we cannot reach solely by human reason, now or perhaps ever. Its technical achievements in health and economics promise to make the age of AI an age of abundance. While we celebrate that potential, we recognize that a new reality is emerging. As the stakes rise, our reponse must meet them.