I enjoyed a week in enchanting, intriguing Seville. The photo is the tomb of Christopher Columbus in the Seville Cathedral. In the Age of Discovery, Seville had a Spanish monopoly on ships to/from the New World. Historic Seville can teach us a lot about our own AI-driven age of discovery. Both eras have a lot in common, driven by science, greed and missionization.
Europe won that technological race: compared to the indigenous populations of the “New World”, it had superior sailing/navigation/mapping tech, it had superior military tech, it had deep capital markets to fund the expeditions, and it had a belief in its cultural and religious superiority. That’s a good description of the people leading the AI race today.
Europeans in the Age of Discovery expanded human knowledge and science dramatically, and AI will do the same now. But even though some actors were driven by science and a pure search for knowledge, most were driven by greed. Leaders in the field of AI are now accumulating vast (perhaps bubble) riches, just as the riches of the New World poured into Seville in the Age of Discovery. As a tourist in Seville, you can still visit the architectural gems financed by plundering the New World indigenous populations. Then as now, some people got very rich, but most people got much poorer. The Spanish royal house got rich, the indigenous populations were plundered. The tech bros of today have gotten obscenely rich, the soon-to-be-unemployed legions of workers of today replaced by AI agents will get poor.
The biggest losers of the Age of Discovery were the indigenous populations, wiped out by European-introduced diseases. 90% of indigenous populations were wiped out within one century of contact with European colonizers. AI will probably do the same to us: it’s becoming a consensus that superintelligence (whenever that happens) will eventually similarly cull or eliminate homo sapiens. Lots of leaders are calling for a (temporary) ban on developing superintelligence, until our species can figure out how to build this safely. My former colleague, Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel prize-winning AI genius is amongst them.
History tends to repeat itself. As we enter into our own new AI-driven age of discovery, ask yourself if you think you and your society will become winners or losers. A lot of people today think they’ll be winners: tech bros (obviously), governments and businesses looking for new tech-driven growth and profits, scientists, entire countries like China or the US which are currently leading the race. But lots of people will be losers: in particular, looming job destruction and unemployment, in turn leading to social disruption, which in turn historically tends to lead to revolutions. Which do you think you’ll be, winner or loser? Even if AI doesn’t destroy humanity, yet, it may well destroy democracy. It will destroy privacy too (I’ll blog about that separately).
Privacy is anchored in the idea of the dignity of the individual human being. There wasn’t much dignity in being an indigenous person dying of smallpox during the Age of Discovery, or an African victim of the trade routes of the Age of Discovery that evolved into the slave trade. Can we do better today? Machines don’t believe in privacy: they consume data to output data to accomplish a task. The rise of AI is the challenge of our age. You might ask where to start: how about stopping private companies from plundering other people’s intellectual property or personal data to train their AI models, as the Spanish conquistadors plundered the wealth of the indigenous populations.
Lots of us need to step up to confront this challenge. Or we can leave it in the hands of the tech bros and gullible politicians and impotent regulators, who are welcoming AI like Montezuma welcoming the Spanish.
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