ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE

For eighty years humans have lived under the threat of a nuclear exchange between superpowers, intended or unintended. Despite the elapsed time, many still consider this threat to be at the top of their list of global concerns and something that continues to keep them up at night — and much more so as of late. Others have never learned or largely forgotten that their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents rigged the whole of the northern hemisphere with these highest of explosives and happily go about their lives never considering it.

Regardless of where folks sit on that spectrum, when presented with the facts (their numbers and yield; who has them; their astonishingly fast modern delivery systems and, thus, curt decision-making time; the ease with which accidents can and have happened; the ramifications of a many-siloed riposte; and on) there seems to be a broad consensus that, in a world inherently permeated by perils, we’ve made for ourselves an additional abominably intractable one that should not even exist. Maddeningly too, this problem is one we refuse to solve, preferring instead to gift this ghastly heirloom to every subsequent generation. And it is from this place we may be seeing the emergence of the first flickerings of artificial intelligence. Though just about everyone agrees we aren’t living with the initial bloom of inorganic sentience, some in the know are expressing concerns that we may be far further along and more quickly than anticipated on the journey to that pinnacle (or terminal) feat of science and engineering: artificial general superintelligence.

For a taste of how different this time we are living in is from any other, it’s helpful to notice the quickening pace of change. To do so, folks often reference Moore’s law: that it takes about 18 months to two years of technological advancement to double the number of transistors we can pack into an integrated circuit (thereby improving the speed and capacity of our devices on a predictable exponential curve.) But what matters here is that it took 50 years of science and engineering for Moore’s law to gift us an increase in transistor density of 10 orders of magnitude. While that is a big change and fast, and a technological leap that has fundamentally altered our world in so very many ways, the processing power used for artificial intelligence training has increased by 10 orders of magnitude in only a decade. So in 2013, the cutting edge neural networks ran on one or two petaFLOPS (two quadrillion, or a billion million, or 2x10^15 operations.) Here in 2023 the cutting edge AI runs on five billion times that processing power. That makes the incredible, head-spinning rate of change of Moore’s law appear positively sluggish.

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