Artificially Unintelligent

20,000 engineers.

20,000 engineers are currently working on a single algorithm to provide you with the most accurate porn results it can find.

20,000 engineers co-operating on organising and compiling the largest depository of knowledge that man has ever created.

20.000 engineers participating in programming one of the most advanced computer systems on the plant.

20,000 engineers creating the first artificial intelligence.

Or perhaps they already have, and they are just the guys working for Google.

What about the other FAANG companies. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google. What about the still un-profitable Twitter, all of whom have immense armies of programmers, engineers and designers working on similar programs.

Worldwide those working specifically on the the creation of artificial intelligence is estimated to be around 300,000 computer engineers. Yet this is still a drop in the bucket to the total amount of computer and telecoms engineers working on the creation and operation of the immense network, colloquially called “the internet”, on which the majority of global trade and enterprise now rests.

If you aren’t familiar with the internet, then perhaps you should go back to whichever specialised care facility you came from… Its impact on world economics has been so immeasurable that more people now have access (55.1%) than have access to clean drinking water and sanitation (39%). Those that have access use the internet for an average of 6.6 hours every single day.

This network of interconnected people independently operating and interacting on various platforms have created whole new ways of understanding humanity. Revealing our ability to combine and co-operate even when there is no cohesive guidance to direct the disparate intelligence towards a goal. Even when there are language barriers, halting the free flow of information between cultures, the goal becomes to overwhelm with more information.

Humanity is distracted and misunderstands the nature of our own creations. We created artificial life decades ago. An achievement that merited little fanfare, and no recognition until recently. The most basic form of organic life is the virus, followed by the bacteria. These simple organisms whose sole purpose is to reproduce and to consume; often with negative side effects that destroy or damage the host, were replicated early on in the life of computing. We even called them the same thing but failed to recognise the implications.

The Ebola Virus
The Wanna-cry Virus


We had created life.

Life which just consumed, destroyed and reproduced, but still… life.

What did we do to our first creation as gods? Created anti-virus software to hunts down and eliminate them. Yet this is redundant point as the process of artificial evolution had begun, but this is not process created from within but a process that has been created from without. Conscious construction, alteration, diversification and complification. Where programs originally just took a few bytes of coding they now take gigabytes or terabytes of code.

So what type of life could be associated with our later accomplishments?

Are our word-processors, like trained birds parroting back our words to us?

Is a search function like a trusty hound returning our lost information upon our command?

Does bitcoin operate like a school of fish dispersing computations among its many constituent parts in order to decide its result?

Does social media operate with the complexity of a hive? Has the medium become a life form though its usurpation of the individual intelligences that participate within it? Are twitter storms more similar to swarms of warrior ants overwhelming and consuming its enemy? The hive mind is not a new concept, and when it is invoked as an attempt at irony perhaps it is closer to the truth than we might want to know.

The intelligence and combined ability of hives and colonies can be impressive and terrifying. For example bees have been able to compute and evolve highly efficient ways of solving mathematical problems such as heat distribution, the hexagonal comb provides strength efficiency and solves problems with heat distribution. These innovations have allowed them to construct immense buildings in relation to their individual size. Cooperation have allowed these creatures to have an impact that are far greater than their individual size would suggest.
Honey Comb, Honey
Social media has done the same. Distribution of diverse intelligences cooperating towards an unknown result. What the result of such computational power will be is terrifying in its unintentionally, and therefore its unpredictability.

We have already seen this new artificial life makes its first forays into the world at large. Separating, segregating and repressing those that distrust it. Reaffirming biases to encourage the removal of those that disrupt its singular thought. Lashing out at those that threaten it, and now cannibalising itself to purify its own network.

It may not be the same type of intelligence that we were originally hoping for but there's certainly and intelligence greater than a single human mind already at work shaping society and our future. So what about those 300,000 engineers working on A.I.? If social media can threaten society so systemically and unintentionally, what is a true A.I. going to be capable of doing to us without us realising?

The Village of the Damned, Social Committee

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