In a recent piece titled “How to Future,” Kevin Kelly, one of Wired’s founding editors, writes that “most futurists are actually predicting the present. The truth is, the present is very difficult to see.”
What will revolutionize tomorrow often seems like an aberration, a niche, a triviality, or an impossibility today. Kelly then offers some advice I’ve been reflecting on: “Sometimes I think of ‘seeing the present’ as trying to use alien eyes: looking at the world as if I were an alien from another planet.”
So, in the spirit of futurism, I’m going to try to look at this moment as if it were an extraterrestrial. What could get my attention?
A starting point may be just that: starting with extraterrestrials. On May 17, the Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation of the US House Intelligence Committee held a hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena.
We now have dozens of instances of weird aerial objects detected by “multiple instruments”, not to mention those seen by experienced pilots. In 18 of them, the objects appear to move with no obvious source of propulsion or appear to be masking their mode of locomotion—their “signature”—in ways that we believe no country on the planet has the technology to do.
“There are a number of events for which we have no explanation, and there are a small handful with flight characteristics or signature control that we can’t explain with the data at our fingertips,” the deputy director of naval intelligence said in a statement. , Scott Bray.
A theme of the hearing was the work the government is doing to “de-stigmatize” reports of these sightings. In other words, there are many, many more sightings than we are aware of, in part because you would be seen as crazy if you spoke too loudly about what you saw. So the sightings we can investigate are only a small fraction of the total (something I’m very aware of whenever I mention this topic and my inbox fills with UFO reports).
Looking at the testimony, I wouldn’t say that the conclusion to be drawn is that we have been receiving visits from extraterrestrials. Perhaps all this turns out to be the result of optical illusions and sensor malfunctions. But I would put it this way: a few years ago I considered the probability of there being anything concrete in the UFO sightings very low; today it seems to me more likely that there is something real happening, although we don’t know what it is.
And that leads me to another strange story that made the news: that Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google (now suspended), believes that the artificial intelligence system Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, became sentient (that is, can learn through the senses, acquired consciousness).
LaMDA is an artificial intelligence model that has been trained with mountains of text to mimic human conversation, predicting which word normally follows the previous word. In this respect, it is similar to OpenAI’s famous GPT-3 bot. And the results are truly bizarre.
Google says it investigated Lemoine’s statements and doesn’t believe LaMDA is sentient (what a sentence!). But just before Lemoine said what he did, a Google vice president, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, wrote that when he was speaking to LaMDA, “I felt the ground shake under my feet. be talking to something intelligent.” Agüera y Arcas was not claiming that LaMDA is sentient, as Lemoine says, but it is clear that interacting with LaMDA was a disturbing experience for him.
I don’t believe the LaMDA is sentient. If you train a machine learning algorithm to write like a human would, you should expect that over time it starts sounding like a human when it writes. What I do believe is that LaMDA is one of many examples that prove that artificial intelligence is getting better, and in less time, than society is really prepared to face.
Most people I know who work with AI say that we are rapidly moving towards a world in which machines capable of learning will transform everything and possibly even know they are doing it. At first, I doubted them. But the new wonders that appear with each passing year confirm your predictions, not mine. It is possible that we will reach a ceiling, but that hasn’t happened yet. And our world can be transformed by an AI that is far less than sentient.
Let’s take an example: how to establish the truth when AI models are able to write, design and create videos better than most humans can, and at almost zero cost? The question of whether, for example, high school students wrote their own essays begins to seem impossible — let alone the possibilities of organized and weaponized disinformation.
And that brings us to the hearings on January 6th. At the heart of our difficulty in predicting the future is our premise of stability. Things are like that today, so they will probably be like that tomorrow too. What makes this way of thinking seductive is that it often corresponds to the truth. But then, all of a sudden, it doesn’t match anymore.
Much of what the January 6 hearings revealed to us we already knew. There was an organized attempt to deny and overturn the 2020 election results. There was resistance from many whose acquiescence would have been necessary: ​​Attorney General William Barr, who described the theories as “nonsense”, and Vice President Mike Pence , who tried to mobilize security forces to quell the insurrection on Capitol Hill.
But President Donald Trump did more than acquiesce. He supported the efforts. He refused to call in security forces to protect the Capitol. He propagated the conspiracy theories that turned the insurgents into patriots in their minds. He spoke at the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the insurrection and, in his own words, wanted to lead the crowd to the Capitol steps. And even after the building was broken into, a majority of Republican lawmakers voted against certifying the election results.
However, the question that inspires much of the comments about the select committee hearings on January 6 is: “Do they [as audiências] Will they change anything?” Fox News initially declined to broadcast the hearings. No one believes the GOP will stop Trump from participating in the 2024 primaries because of his actions. On the contrary, the GOP has moved even closer to Trump.
After the insurrection, Representative Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader, told other Republicans that he would encourage Trump to resign from the presidency. He later denied making those comments, but then the audio of his statements surfaced. Republicans have already nominated dozens of candidates who strongly support Trump’s lies and maneuvers to subvert the 2020 election. Republicans in power in 2024 will be far more open to Trump’s arguments than those in power in 2020.
I don’t think the American political system is likely to fall apart in the next few years. But to what extent, exactly, is this improbable? Until a few years ago, two events stood out to me as signs of the iron stability of our political system.
The first was Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate affair, which he made in an effort to avoid impeachment and conviction, after realizing that many in his own party would vote with the Democrats to remove him.
The second event was the 2000 election, when Al Gore admitted defeat despite genuine uncertainty and confusion surrounding the poll results. Both facts highlighted a political culture in which, at moments of greatest importance, members of both parties put the stability of the system first.
None of these situations would unfold in the same way today. Nixon would survive, backed by Fox News and a more radicalized Republican Party. A scenario similar to that of 2000 would cause chaos in the streets, and the Supreme Court would have nothing resembling the credibility it used to intervene in the Bush v. Gore.
The conditions that helped us to face past challenges no longer exist. It’s hard to get people to pay sustained attention to the congressional inquiry into the attempt to subvert the 2020 election, even though it revolves around one of the leading candidates in the 2024 election. It’s an almost majestic refusal to face the present.
I must admit that with a lot of this I betrayed another one of Kevin Kelly’s futuristic sayings. “Trying to see beyond immediate news cycles is a challenge,” he writes. But the fact is, I’m not a futurist – I’m a journalist. All of these stories have been featured in the news for the past few months. To take any of them seriously—to believe that the direction they point is the direction we’re going to go—is to believe that we are on the cusp of a future very different from our past. In this regard, George Orwell was right when he said: “Seeing what is in front of our own nose requires constant effort.”
