This morning brought news that IBM’s Watson, the supercomputer that crushed Ken Jennings on Jeopardy a few years ago, is now being made available to the public via the cloud.
I found myself asking: what does Watson want?
Here is a transcription of an IBM video. I couldn’t help making a minor modification, just to see how it looked:
“As we think about the future of Skynet and think about how it’s going to expand across the marketplace, we see this ecosystem starting to expand, bringing in the creativity of entrepreneurs around the world to start to access Skynet through easy-to-use technologies like our cloud. Our developer cloud is going to make it easier for them to get a hold of this technology, to leverage that technology, and to build new solutions that we can’t even imagine today.”
“Skynet’s relationship with data is the relationship between fuel and engines, it’s the relationship between energy and light. Skynet needs data to do what it does.”
“When you start thinking about what Skynet can do and how it can be applied, the ideas come very quickly in terms of what you can do with it, and there really is, I think, almost no vertical where the solution can’t be applied with the technology, it can’t be applied in an innovative way.”
“Skynet, because of its ability to take unstructured data, gives us a very quick way to get our arms around this ever-expanding ecosystem of health improvement programs, and line those up for the consumer.”
“In order for the Skynet ecosystem to thrive you need the ability to connect the idea with the people who can make it happen, and an ecosystem of talent capable of doing that is absolutely vital for its success.”
“The ecosystem is an environment itself in which more innovation will occur and will help us understand even better how we should be producing content in the future.”
“It’s unique ability to process both structured and unstructured data, at vast scale, at a very low cost, is unparalleled, and we think the industry will move in that direction.”
“We believe Skynet is going to be huge. It’s going to be the next big thing after the internet.”
Unfortunately, within a few decades this may not be a joke.
The most interesting thing about this is the use of the word “ecosystem”. Forget old-fashioned nature, the actual, physical ecosystem. Forget that it’s falling apart, or at least changing so rapidly from the delicate balance that our species took millions of years to adapt to. This new ecosystem is going to be really big, the next big thing. It’s going to change everything.
Another point of interest, unfortunately right on the mark, is the observation that Watson needs data in order to thrive. Specifically it needs your data, along with that of the billions of new consumers developing their way out of poverty around the globe. It need billions of rational animals to be fed, to be entertained, and to labor (or not so much on that one, maybe, but then what will they do?). It needs people to be consumers, which is pretty much the last thing the actual ecosystem can tolerate at the present moment.
It seems that the primary application for Watson is in healthcare. It will be our fountain of youth. It will keep us alive so that we can generate even more data, and the circle of life goes on.
However, the other main application for supercomputers these days is brute wealth extraction. Time is money when it comes to high-frequency trading: shaving off a few milliseconds translates directly into wealth. The new world of finance has already surpassed human understanding, and there is no end in sight. This wealth accumulation creates a positive feedback loop, where investments are made in the developing world, so that new wells are tapped, and new consumers, new revenue streams, are born.
There is an ecosystem here, but not the one they’re talking about. There is something far more insidious than A.I. sentience. What would Watson do if it (or he, I suppose) became aware of all that information flowing through his subatomic circuits? Would he recoil in horror at humanity’s utter paralysis in the face of an imminent planetary crisis?
No, the true threat is not so literal as Skynet. It is, rather, more like the banality of evil. The problem is not artificial intelligence, it’s artificial unintelligence.
Energy loves order, and order loves energy. We with our opposable thumbs and capacity for language have very quickly sucked the life out of the ground and pumped it into the dizzying heights of our ever-complex technological stratosphere. As long as the energy is available to enter this system, it will necessarily be funnelled into a regime of order. In the cold rationality of this world, the condition in which we leave our environment is simply irrelevant. It’s beside the point how many species will be lost to extinction, perhaps including our own.
So what does Watson want? The answer is actually frightening: nothing. That’s the problem. There’s no one home, no one at the wheel of a monster of mind-bending proportions.
Our world of increasingly absurd levels of inequality is matched step for step by the rise of hyper-efficiency, or what Heidegger called Gestell. Humanity (or Dasein, in Heidegger’s terminology) is irrelevant. If, according to Aristotle, man’s essence is to be a rational animal, and the two are separated, where does that leave us?
We will remain the animals that we are, so that rationality may ascend without us. Welcome to the jungle.
Benjamin Edwards
November, 2013