AFTER THE PLUG IS PULLED

LAURENCE C. SMITH

Professor and chair of geography; professor of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, UCLA; author, The World in 2050

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What’s the big deal about machines that think? For a small group of philosophers and theologians, I get it—but for the rest of us, artificial intelligence will just be the latest incremental step in a long stampede of technological encroachment that has already changed the world almost beyond recognition.

For that very important job of thinking that seeks to solve problems, there’s little doubt that adaptive, machine-based learning will do better than any one human brain (or even an entire conference of experts). Machines already think more deeply about your consumer preferences than you do, through creepy, financially motivated adaptive algorithms that track your online behavior. But other purposes now underway include smarter policing and identifying potential child-abuse situations, both drawn from disparate data pulled together to identify a broader pattern.

That process has been a hallmark of human thinking since we walked out onto the savannah, and as the world’s problems become more dire and more complicated, we ought to accept any effective tool to battle them. I could live with a partnership with machine learning in order to make complex modern life more resource-efficient in a way that human brains cannot. A world of sustainably grown food, sufficient clean water for humans and ecosystems, and comfortable, energy-efficient lodging is still possible and could be advanced in part by thinking machines.

History suggests that the partnership will proceed in an incremental way, relatively unnoticed by busy people living out their busy lives. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that our worst fears come true, things get out of hand, and at some point thinking machines topple the reign of Homo sapiens. Then what? I have no doubt we’d somehow manage to pull the plug. A great retoppling would occur, and we’d once again regain dominion over the lands, oceans, and skies. Depending on the depth of the integration and the height of the fall, the human experience might even revert to something more closely resembling the world of ten millennia ago than of today, as we relearn from scratch the basics of acquiring food, water, shelter, and transport without the help of our thinking machines.