The Rubik’s Cube, a 3D combination puzzle, is a global symbol of intellectual challenge and creativity. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) researchers developed a system called DeepCubeA that can solve the puzzle in an average of 1.2 seconds in about 20 moves.
Headlines tout AI solving complex problems and providing valuable insights into human reasoning, but these systems often use uncontrollable volumes of data and masquerade as profundity through redundancy and simplification.
What Winston Churchill said about Russia applies to today’s problems too: “An enigma wrapped in an enigma, a riddle wrapped in an enigma.” The roots of Russia’s relationship with the West lie in centuries of uncertainty. Vladimir Putin is not just a Rubik’s Cube or a card trick. Like the rest of the world, he embodies historical ambiguity and is more than a problem to be solved.
Complexity is not as much of a problem as the tendency to turn a trouble into a crisis, which ensures its seriousness and prompts an immediate response. A crisis requires rapid action to prevent serious consequences. A natural disaster, terrorist attack, or tragic accident occurs, requiring decisive measures. Help is available immediately. When a crisis hits close to home, neighbors become closer to each other, such as helping each other dig out their cars after a big snowstorm.
A blizzard isn’t always a blizzard. Most troubles aren’t crises, at least not immediately. And that can stir anxiety. “I can handle crises, but it’s the everyday life that gets me down.” The most difficult problems are mundane, like a troubled marriage, recovering from a serious illness, or living with chronic pain. (“I’d rather be dead.”)
When we sound the alarm, we confuse urgency with importance. This leads us to seek obvious, immediate solutions, like finding the right medication instead of exercising more. Or, on a global scale, we argue that “we need to act now to avert climate disaster,” while forgetting that “we” is not just the United States and other high-income countries. 70% of the recent increase in emissions is due to billions of poor people in the developing world struggling for the safety and comfort of a middle-class life. Lifting oneself out of poverty is far more carbon intensive than gaining wealth.
Whether the sky is falling or not, sometimes you just need to believe it. After weeks of relentless rain, I heard a woman cry out, “I’m so used to misery that I can’t stand a good day.” Misery is a comforting default that prevents us from striving for something better. Many of us are on the verge of “crisis fatigue” without even thinking about the next election, which is a good excuse to do nothing. Bill Gates once joked, “I choose lazy people to do the hard jobs because lazy people find easy ways.”
AI’s biggest problem is our problem. The allure of simplicity, not complexity. “Solutionism” is the ideology of the moment.
AI can imitate human intelligence, but it cannot replicate it. AI is busy solving problems and pretending to be rational. Love and heartbreak, anger and forgiveness, and other deep emotions are often at odds with reason. Life is a “mystery wrapped in a mystery,” too complicated for AI, and it will never be able to understand it. simply truth.
The danger is not that machines will become more and more human, until they one day replace us; the bigger threat is that they will become more and more human, until they eventually surpass us.
Often we feel alone, overwhelmed and unsure of what to do. But the future doesn’t lie in new solutions or different answers. It belongs to immeasurable love. It’s harder than the toughest problems and it’s the real trick in the deck.
Notes and reading
“Just a single neuron in your brain…” —Andrew Ng, Wired (February 2, 2015). This is a good article of Similarities and differences between biological intelligence and artificial intelligence. Ng is a great response to techno-utopians and pessimists.
AI and the Rubik’s Cube – Engadget: Technology News (July 17, 2019) Fast Company (January 19, 2021).
AI Atlas – Kate Crawford (2021). A material and political look at what it takes to make AI and how it centralizes power. – Crawford is co-founder of the AI Now Institute at New York University.
Climate Change – ““Developing countries are the new emissions hotspots…” – United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). – Also, Persuasion (Substack – June 12, 2024).
“Defense of the Machine” – “The struggle against dehumanizing machines and technologies is not unique to our own time, even if it sometimes feels like we are working under particularly frightening conditions.” C.W. Howell (June 11, 2024) — Howell is a clinical assistant professor at Washington State University and academic program director for the C.S. Lewis Foundation.
On Complexity (Systems Theory, Complexity, and Advances in Human Sciences) – Edgar Morin (2008). Morin, now 103 years old, is the “founder of transdisciplinarity” and teeth French philosopher and sociologist known for his work on complexity and “complex thinking.” – “The complexity paradigm relies on a fusion of Western and Eastern thinking.”
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
