Google and Kissinger: The Singularity is Coming

This night's post will be very far afield from the mundane concerns of electronic discovery or general legal technology. Today I watched a Zoom webinar on which Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt discussed artificial intelligence and the future of human civilization. If you want to grab an attorney's attention about the likelihood that AI will change the way the world works, you could do worse than to point out that Nixon's international relations consigliere and ego stroker, and one of the founders of Google are concerned enough about the possibility of a technological singularity (in which AI will begin to rapidly upgrade itself independently of human control (like in Terminator, but hopefully with better results)) to co-author a book about it, The Age of AI.

Here's some key takeaways from the discussion at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies today:

- Kissinger believes that AI will involve a different perception of reality - a shift away from the perception developed during the Enlightenment.

- We may see fighter jets controlled by AI, and it will be impossible for human operators to predict what they will do.

- If machines can operate unfettered, there will be a threat to our ability to organize human life.

- There is a strong possibility that artificial intelligence will interpret its assignments differently than human programmers.

- Kissinger asked a leading AI expert what his main focus was, who answered that he was working on making objects partners with humans, and providing those objects with their own judgment. When Kissinger questioned the wisdom of doing this, the expert said that he was only focused on how to do it.