Considerations Beyond Singularity

“The applications to be developed, the functionalities the AI system shall have, how or what is to be classified, where the training data comes from, and what the optimization aim is – all these are decisions made by people.” (Rania Wazir)

In his book Scary Smart Mo Gawdat writes, “It is not the experts who have the capability to alleviate the threat facing humanity as a result of the emergence of superintelligence. No, it is you and I who have that power.” In terms of self-empowerment, these two quotes describe IMA’s fundamental way of dealing with AI systems.

Like earlier IMA projects (Sound Machines, Knowledge Machines, DigiDic), Whitebox AI deals with the emergence of new disruptive technologies and their impacts on art and society. Once the digitalization of all living environments and artifacts has occurred, pattern recognition by computers and algorithms will proceed to determine all of our interactions with machines. The outcome for everything from automatic text correction to autonomous driving, from ad music to commercials, from personnel decisions to executions by killer drones, will be determined or influenced by so-called artificial intelligences.

In the areas of speech recognition, text, video, and music generation, tools such as ChatGPT, Jasper.ai, DALL E, Gen-2, and Suno AI are currently causing quite a stir. Especially the technology’s connotation with intelligence, purportedly the last human refuge, seems to pose a threat. And yet AI is part of the long tradition of humanity’s dreams and practices involving assistants, slaves, and machines that are at our constant beck and call, but which also threaten to become more powerful than us or to replace us altogether. This would mark the predicted end point of technological singularity. A point in time when the first superintelligence takes over and humanity falls into a black hole of its own creation.

Let’s work together to shape a future beyond singularity!

Seppo Gründler & Elisabeth Schimana