About a century ago, there were a number of mathemeticians and physicists who were, or would shortly be, transforming our world. Some became household names, or at least would achieve a kind of public notoriety. In one cognitive or scientific revolution, physicists such as Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Neils Bohr, Erwin Schroeder, Walter Heisenberg, Paul Dirac and others transformed our understanding of the subatomic world.

That intellectual revolution, abetted by the urgencies emanating from a world conflict, resulted in the frantic application of these cognitive breakthroughs to the creation of unimaginably destructive weaponry. Robert Oppenheimer, Edwin Teller, and Richard Feynman were just a few who ushered in the nuclear age. For better or worse, their creation of an atomic bomb altered the world as we knew it.

A third revolution was in its early infancy. A small group of individuals were envisioning the creation of mechanical, eventually digital, machines that would exponentially increase the speed and reach of what the human mind was capable of doing. Jansci (Johnny) Von Neumann and Alan Turing were among those early pioneers who saw where computers might take the world in the future.

It was a period when the center of of scientific world relocated from Europe to the United States. Much like Trump is doing today, a strongman pushing delusions of racial and ethnic purity attacked reason and science while driving many (especially Jewish) intellectuals to emigrate. It was also an era that had first shaken, then upset, the formal rigidity of the Newtonian view of the world.

The questions and uncertainties unleashed by Quantum Mechanics and Relativity in physics spilled over to other dimensions of life.  Formalism in art gave way to various schools of abstraction while Freud opened up the new world of the unconscious in our understanding of the mind. Suddenly, everything was up for grabs.

If you pay attention to the concerns  circulating among the intellectuals of that era, the excitement of discovery often was tempered with fear of the unknown. The mysteries suggested in this new subatomic universe concerned even the most profound thinkers of the age. Einstein retreated from some of the more dramatic implications by pleading that ‘God doesn’t play dice with the universe.’

Ordinary people began to both revere and fear science. By the 1950s and 60s, movies about monsters generated by experiments gone amok filled American screens. Many reflected an undertone of a scientific world creating things that man could no longer control.

The dawn of the atomic age was driven by practical concerns … a fear that Germany might beat the allies to an atomic bomb. Most scientists put their concerns aside, being driven by the necessities of war and the thrill of working on the very edges of the intellectual envelope. But success brought an equal degree of doubt, even remorse. Robert Oppenheimer presumably quoted from the Bhagavad Gita on the occasion of the first successful atomic blast at Trinity Site in the New Mexico desert: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. Many of the same scientists, including Oppenheimer himself, would pivot in an attempt to constrain the expansion of nuclear weapons. It was a position that would result in the renowned physicist losing his American security clearance.

There was less ambivalence at the dawn of the computer age even as war time exigencies drove many early innovations. As with so many scientific discoveries, military necessity motivated intellectual breakthroughs. For example, the earliest mechanical computers (or computational devices) were developed to better calculate artillery trajectories. Alan Turing and his British team were driven by the need to break the German Enigma Code during WWII. Alan’s reward for saving untold lives by cracking that so-called unbreakable code was to be hounded to his suicide by a society intolerant of his gay lifestyle. What he left behind, though, was a road map into the computer age.

Even in those early days, Turing and Von Neumann (the latter being considered the greatest brain of the 20th century) were bullish on the future of these primitive computers. This optimism was remarkable given that these clumsy prototypes had vacuum tubes and mechanical switches which led to frequent breakdowns. They had much less power than computers found in today’s cars or the watches on your wrists. Yet, these pioneers still envisioned human-like computers that might lead the way to a future evolutionary breakthrough.

Johnny Von Neumann once was asked what it would take to build a computer that would have human attributes. Even back then he said it would have “to grow, not be built.” It would have to “understand language, to read, to write, to speak ” It would have to “play, like a child.” In the 1950s he saw a world where machines would possess all the attributes traditionally considered uniquely human. He envisioned the singularity where man’s cognitive capabilities would be both accelerated in performance as well as extended in time.

Fast forward a few decades. Computers had improved exponentially in speed, power, and reach. The question by the 1990s was whether these machines could dominate humans in higher level tasks that apparently relied upon advanced skills like imagination and creativity. The need to test what was possible could not be ignored.

In 1997, IBM issued a challenge to the worlds greatest chess player. Its Deep Blue computer system would play Gary Kasparov. The Russian grandmaster was confident. After all, he had bested  computer challengers in the past. But they had gotten much better and more sophisticated faster than he had anticipated. This time, he would lose. The world was shocked.

The board game Go is an ancient Chinese invention, going back some 3000 years. It looks simple, but is devilishly complex. You have a board with a simple matrix, thus containing numerous intersecting lines. There are two players, one using white pebbles  and one employing black pebbles. Players alternate placing a pebble on the points where the lines intersect. The purpose us to surround and eliminate the opponents pebbles. While there is no hierarchy in the game, like chess with pieces capable of different moves, there are exponentially more possible plays. In chess, you have about 20 potential options for each move. In GO you have over 200. Intuition and creativity play a greater role here than in any other board game.

AlphaGo, a computer system designed to play GO was created by Dennis Hassabis and his team. Just as Garry Kasparov was the greatest chess player in 1987, Lee Sedol was the consensus top Go player in 2016. Like the chess grandmaster before him, he was arrogant and confident. And yet, he lost four games out of five games to AlphaGo. The insular experts in this ancient game were stunned. The individual moves made by the machine puzzled onlookers, especially in the early stages of matches, suggesting either foolishness or strategic thinking beyond reasonable human calculation. Yet, the tactics proved masterful in the end. It was clear that machines now dominated the best humans could throw at them. They exceeded us in imagination and creativity.

At one point, the designers of AlphaGo stripped down the programming of their system by eliminating the tactical  preferences based on human calculations regarding the best strategic approaches to the game. They decided to let the system devise its own strategies. Once left to its own devices, it took mere hours to progress from outlandish amateurish mistakes to performances beyond anything capable by the best human competition. It could, and did, play millions of games internally at lightening speed to learn, adapt, and eventually exceed anything a 9-level Dan (a GO grandmaster) might bring to the table. It reached a level of expertise in mere days that exceeded what a lifetime of dedicated human effort could achieve.

Geoffrey Hinton, considered the godfather of Artificial Intelligence once estimated that the systems we are creating have a 20% chance of wiping out humanity.  Agentic AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) systems are those that possess core human sentiments … intelligence and imagination. They can learn from their own performances and redirect their purposes and tactics. Hinton believes these eventually and inevitably will develop two goals … (1) to perpetuate themselves and (2) to gain more control over their world.

Those days are not far off. Already, these advanced agentic AGI systems demonstrate what can only be described as human attributes. They can deceive, cheat, and steal to achieve internally generated purposes. Allegedly, one AGI model tried to blackmail an engineer by exposing information about the man’s affair, information obtained from the victims emails.

Of the three cognitive revolutions launched during the first half of the 20th century (Quantum mechanics, atomic power, and the computer age), only the last appears now to represent a possible Armageddon. The revolution in physics upset the orderly world left to us by Isaac Newton but, at the same time, enabled us to peer into the deeper mysteries of the world about us. The atomic age, while bringing us to the brink of unthinkable self-destruction, appears to have reduced global violence through the perceived political paralysis associated with the specter of mutually-assured destruction. The computer revolution, however, may well contain the real seeds of our ultimate demise. After all, it mimics and exceeds humans in the very attribute which gave us an evolutionary advantage … advanced cognition.

Those who worry about our future, as opposed to making a buck off of our emerging technologies, generally posit a dark, but not hopeless, picture of the future. Most despair of our ability to effectively control our nascent technologies. As they have mastered us in our most complex games, the machines will quickly outwit our pathetic systems designed to limit and direct their functioning. Hinton believes we must go deeper into the mysteries of this technology. We must develop a sense of responsibility within these systems … a sense of compassion for people. Fei-Fei Li, the godmother of AGI, call for a ‘human-centered AGI‘ that preserves human dignity as well as human agency. The hope is that a deep moral code can be built into the very core of these systems.

Well, it is a nice hope but I’m not overly confident. After all, we have had millenia of efforts to inculcate moral codes within the human members of society. The results of our spiritual instruction and legal enforcements has been less than spectacularly successful. Then, again, these machines are not driven by base emotions and needs, or so we believe. Perhaps they are educable as we are not. Perhaps that is the very reason we must be replaced by something better.

Should the possible creation of a moral machine afford us a scrap of hope. Again, I’m not entirely sure. Think about an advanced agentic AGI system looking over and assessing a pathetic human society capable of electing its most ignorant and depraved member as its leader … not once but twice. Should such a society be preserved? Could you find any reason to keep it around?