Anticipating Singularity: Society’s Future with AI

The idea of being able to access one’s own thoughts by uploading it to the cloud has been a popular theme in sci-fi media. This reality is slowly materializing with the continuous progress in neuroscience along with the advancement in biotechnology. Some view this potential future as a major leap for social sciences, envisioning its application in medicine, clinical psychology, and even law enforcement, while others perceive this technology as the next level of human prowess in the pursuit of becoming better, faster, and stronger individuals. Beyond these comforts, there is also a future where uploaded intelligence is the catalyst to an era of unstoppable, rapid technological growth thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI). 

Futurologists call this period AI singularity. Borrowing the term from the natural sciences, this era signifies an age where AI is at its developmental peak and is utilized at the biological level, therefore, bringing us innovation at an uncontrollable rate. Uploaded intelligence and AI is the event horizon of AI singularity and the advent of technologies like Neuralink has quite literally brought us closer to this reality. Once we have fully mapped out the human mind, it will only be a matter of time when we are able to append our intelligence with AI to become nothing short of superhuman.

In a nutshell, AI singularity can be characterized as the point where AI becomes more intelligent than humans and as a result, society will be obliged to adopt AI by conjoining this technology in our mind and body.

Charting The Era of AI Singularity

One of the characteristics of singularity is its unpredictability. Regardless, tech leaders have theorized on how the world will look once AI singularity is at hand. We can understand the impact of AI singularity by looking at some aspects of society that it revolutionizes.

In business contexts, we might see more tasks being handed over to AI systems starting from the rank-and-file employees even up to the upper levels of management. Think of how AI is currently being used today, we are starting to see more AI powered automation systems like self check-out machines and fully automated storefronts like that of Amazon’s cashierless grocery store. It is not out of reach to say that a lot of white collar jobs will be replaced in the singularity era; while some may see this as a bleak future ushering in an era of mass unemployment, others provide an optimism that AI singularity will provide benefits that outweigh the risks.

In order to reimagine the impact of AI singularity in the lens of business operations, it is imperative to gaze at the history of innovation in our telecommunication systems. The invention of telephony systems required substantial manpower to manually route calls. By the early 1920’s, businesses began to replace their employees with automatic mechanical switches and digital systems. Automation displaced a lot of workers in the communications industry with some of them leaving the workforce completely. Despite this, employment rates still soared historically in the next decades, indicating that this decline was a minor setback when looking at the bigger picture. Economists credited this recovery largely because the benefits of innovation provided new avenues of work and labor; as telecommunication companies modernize their systems, it enabled their services to expand to a larger clientele and offer new products, therefore, requiring labor to be redirected to other parts of the business like customer service and sales. 

This historical event serves as a milestone of how technological innovation may have a negative short term effect but ultimately yields a net positive result for society long term. Today we see a foreshadowing of similar events; AI is now able to take on some of the duties of the clerical workforce and at the same time, new roles are brought about by AI technology such as prompt engineers and AI data scientists. Arguably, these roles require more creativity and complex thinking, similar to how customer service and sales are more intricate than operating a switchboard. We can say that the direction of innovation will provide society with tasks that are more thought-provoking and worthwhile.

There is also a considerable amount of speculation about how AI singularity will transform the medical field. It is already visible today how AI has become a powerful tool in biomedical research; deep learning models and GPT-based AI have proven useful in optimizing pharmaceutical and clinical studies. For example, researchers at Harvard and MIT developed Sybil, an AI deep learning model, that can accurately predict the risk of lung cancer. Not long after, scholars used the GPT model to make drug development research less time consuming by using GPT’s ability to analyze a multitude of comprehensive publications. This shortened the drug seeking process and made competent recommendations in drug development. 

The contributions of AI in the medical field has been predominantly well-received compared to other areas like media, entertainment, and business. Fortunately, there are more valuable things in store in the era of AI singularity. The maxim ‘prevention is better than cure’ is perennial when talking about health and medicine. As such, while the pursuit for new and more effective remedies are dignified, a larger objective is to make health predictions more accurate, accessible, and real-time. Society will inevitably fuse with technology and AI in order to maximize the benefits. Existing technologies that augment human faculties (like that of Neuralink) will be enhanced by AI. Simply put, imagine an all-in-one device that can monitor all your physical, mental, and physiological status. Microchips and computer circuit integration will eliminate the need for individual medical tools like pacemakers, EEGs, glucometers, et cetera. Coupled with AI, health diagnostics will be done in real-time and analyzed by AI to give us vital information like health deficiencies, risks, and possibly even prescriptions. The mass adoption of this technology will only improve over time; AI will have access to an abundant amount of biomedical data to learn from and long term users can have access to state-of-the-art AI medical tools. Essentially, pathological diseases, including various forms of cancer and other serious conditions, will be detected at the earliest possible time, minimizing the need for invasive treatments.

This technological future paints a colorful landscape of society. The advantages of AI development in medicine will effectively prolong life expectancy while providing us with meaningful and rewarding work, as AI becomes capable of handling mundane tasks and humans take on more creative endeavors.

Much of the discourse surrounding AI singularity focuses on the innovations and technological improvements that AI will create. Historical markers may provide us a framework on how similar events have been overcome but there is a lingering uncertainty of the future and the significant difference that AI singularity brings to the table. As per the previous example, job displacement due to rapid improvement in AI systems may pose a more significant problem than what we have seen in history. Primarily, because AI can impact a wider spectrum of the job market, the volume of displaced workers may be massively different causing a scarcity of available work. The time it takes for the market to correct may also be severely underestimated. Because AI systems are easier to implement, the accelerated effects may have a larger impact in the short term and may result in civil unrest and inequality. These events may increase the drawbacks compared to what is previously forecasted by those who anticipate the advent of singularity.

While there is much optimism in the field of medicine, the centralized nature of the AI singularity also proposes a privacy concern for individuals. In particular, such technology may be used to discriminate and exclude individuals from common societal considerations. For example, individuals who are accused of a crime may be discriminated against if they use advanced technologies to determine the levels of sociopathic or antisocial behavior.  As an extension, integrating AI with the human mind can create an over-reliance. Dependence to AI systems will essentially mean that this singular system can act as a killswitch. Therefore, instead of elevating the capabilities of the human mind, what happens effectively is that we are simplifying our complex human faculty by making AI its core component.

These risks and benefits provide a precaution of the consequences of surpassing human intelligence. From here, we can identify where we should create safety nets that can cushion the impact of such technological development without hampering its capabilities. The risks can be mitigated once we begin to understand how AI singularity will materialize in its early stages, but more importantly these efforts start by understanding the hazards and making sure that the technology functions within the interests of society as a whole.