Who Will Shape the Future?
Jensen Huang’s February 13 discussion of cost-effective computing at the UAE’s 2024 World Government Summit (“Who Will Shape the Future of AI?”) is a masterclass on technology from 1964 to the present. The demand for efficient computing has enabled a new application type: artificial intelligence. Many applications today, including AI, now work on accelerated machines, soon all computing will be done on accelerated architectures, and AI in turn will manage accelerated computing generally.
The general-purpose, von Neumann bottleneck computing of today’s installed base, which enabled the PC and the internet, is about to be replaced wholesale. This replacement will amount to a fifth Industrial Revolution (food, steam, electricity and general purpose computing were the first four). The last 10 years have seen a 1,000,000-fold advancement in the efficiency computing. The cost of computing is going down fast and the innovation capability of this computing simultaneously is going up fast. This dual current of cost reduction and innovation gain puts top-tier technology, puts intelligence as such, within reach of the entire planet. Intelligence technology democratizes at the scale of the state. The Fukuyama thesis is alive and well.
Jensen goes on to argue for Computational Sovereignty. Every culture, every nation needs to own its intelligence because every culture, every nation will need to adapt to the Artificial Intelligence Revolution. Every culture will need to wake up to the reality of artificial intelligence because every culture, every state, now needs, in self-solidarity, to improve and better to produce its own distinctive form, its distinctive legacy, of intelligence, of history and common sense.
We see a little-noticed, parallel logic now at work deep inside society. The computational architecture of the human body has likewise become increasingly well-understood and inexpensive to access, and outsized social and economic gains can, we believe, now be realized by developing conversation-as-consciousness. Not only will vast improvements in societal and emotional intelligence be accomplished by testing and extending conversation theory, but the reality of the future will be transformed eventually, preferably stepwise and in a controlled manner, into something quite unrecognizable. Future human and terrestrial self-consciousness (future terrestrial reality) will become something diaphanous, something replete with guidance, revelation and astonishment. That diaphanous world will be enabled by an ancient, diverse and mysterious but uniformly improving biological architecture, evolved over eons of cosmic history. Conversation theory will force an adaptation to the stream of cosmic self-consciousness.
For a free-wheeling discussion of this Post with Pi, click here.
