Frankenstein's Algorithm

 

Halloween always conjures monsters in the mind. Be they crawling from a swamp or of a more spectral nature, we’ve (Western Civilization) built a foundational mythos for all that goes bump in the night and focused this investigation of the uncanny on the 31^st of October.

Now, in no way does this mean that all these fear-based fabrications are real in any tangible sense, but merely constructs spliced together from the darker corners of our own psyche and natures.  This was just the case with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. We’re all familiar with the story, both in background and analysis, so I’ll not beat that to death here, but what I’d rather do is pose a new parallel: Just as Dr. Frankenstein pieced together a living, self-aware abomination for his own ends and with little regard to the potential fallout, so even now we are doing with Artificial General Intelligence, and nothing could be scarier.

 

As I write this, numberless start-ups, corporations, tech companies, defence contractors, and whole nations are throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at the problem of bringing to life a digital Frankenstein (yes, I know its “Frankenstein’s monster”, but for brevity here, lets go with the colloquial).  The upside will theoretically be that whoever can evolve this beast and chain it to their will is going to win. At everything. An entity that can become logarithmically smarter in microseconds and who will be for all intents and purposes omniscient will be able to surveil, analyze, and influence using current infrastructure every aspect of our existence, from defence to finance to communications and social engineering.

 

There’s a big ‘IF’ here: namely that such an entity, which we will suppose to be self aware, can be chained at all. I fear we’re just as ignorant as Victor Frankenstein himself when he said, “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.” How’d that work out for our ambitious Dr.? The problem being that when this rough beast slouches off into the digital night to do as it will, you’ll not be able to rally a posse of townsfolk with pitchforks and torches to do it in.

 

The hubris of our species will see that this shall come to pass. Maybe not on the hundredth, or the thousandth, or the ten thousandth instantiation, but eventually the right patchwork of salvaged algorithms and neural nets will yield new life.  How this being will respond to our band of violent and fearful apes is basically a coin toss.

 

Sleep tight, my friends, this Halloween night, and fear ye well the ghost in the machine!

 

The Editor