Organic and silicon routes to experience the Cosmos

2022 has been a very special year for humankind. Yet another special year, as many might say, following a series of economic crises, pandemic rise, and great technological breakthroughs that we all have witnessed in the last years, so nothing new about this year too, right?

Well, not quite. 2022 has been a very special year, as we have all welcomed Generative AI*, a new player that has arrived to change our lives irreversibly. 

Generative AI, like #ChatGPT, is a type of artificial intelligence technology that creates new content, including text, imagery, audio, and synthetic data, based on what it has learned from existing content.

And this ground-breaking achievement marks exactly this very moment that people outside the tech industry, ordinary people, started realizing what AI is capable of and how it’s going to change their own lives.

This is why it is most likely that 2022 will be remembered as the year of the AI disruption, not because the machines have grown their self-awareness, as prophesied in the dystopic fiction, but rather than human kind itself has got their first grasp on how everyday things around normal life will start to change with AI.

In plain words, we just got ourselves before that steep cliff of our own evolution in the years to come and it is the first time we are gazing at it with our own eyes, the first time that it starts to make real, practical sense to us all.

The Artificial General Intelligence (#AGI) era has just begun, empowering the development of machines that can perform any intellectual task that a human can, and potentially at one point, sooner rather than later as predicted, surpass human intelligence itself.

ChatGPT, this first version of AGI, can be nothing more than a prelude to what we should expect in the future – a future that is now in the making.

Let’s now take a breath for a moment and see how everything started (literally).

Something from nothing: Quantum mechanics says that “nothing” is unstable and empty space is not truly empty but is instead teeming with quantum fluctuations. Quantum fluctuations are tiny, random fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime that arise due to the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics.

Quantum fluctuations provide a possible explanation for how the universe could have arisen from a state of nothingness through a “big bang”. (A vast Universe out of nothing – What?!?!?)

The Big Bang and the 4 fundamental forces: The Big Bang theory describes the universe starting from a hot, dense state that rapidly expanded and cooled. Immediately afterward (in less than a nanosecond) the four fundamental forces of nature – gravity, electromagnetism, and strong and weak nuclear forces – began to separate from each other.

This separation played a crucial role in shaping the structure and evolution of the universe as we know it today all that we experience in the universe is the outcome of these fundamental forces.

After the separation, modern science takes a turn to describe how we got here:

• Particle physics → hydrogen and helium are born
• Astrophysics → stars are born (and die with explosions)
• Chemistry → with star explosions (supernovas) heavier elements appear (iron, oxygen, carbon, etc)
• Astronomy → our solar system and earth are born
• Biology → self-replicating molecules
• Evolutionary biology → complex multicellular organisms
• Anthropology → self-aware emotional, and thinking humans

  

Children of the universe? Maybe even more than this, a story of the universe ourselves!

Now let’s take a second breath and see the bigger picture

So what is Homo Universalis aspiring to do through Artificial General Intelligence? Maybe to experience the Cosmos through an alternative route that leads again to the 4 fundamental forces. It took 13.8b years for physics to build an interface to chemistry and then another interface to biology which is an interface for the human mind that experiences the Cosmos. Now in less than 70 years, we can build ourselves this:

AI, as an interface to Python → C → Assembly → Binary → Physics → 4 fundamental forces!

It took the Cosmos 13.8b years and an evolutionary process to build a thinking human mind with the capability to experience its environment, and then it took only 70 years to build a first form of Artificial General Intelligence that again can experience the Cosmos but from another route!

Our biggest challenge lies ahead of us, while the best part is that we are already aware of it. It could have started as an aid to do things better, faster, and easier until it will reach a point where it will be just about ready to surpass our intelligence and we will hold the leash for a while.

But only for a while, until we get ourselves ready to embark on our great ride to the Cosmos, as a new, hybrid species of an ever-expanding intelligence, capable of processing information and accumulating knowledge as never before, harnessing the unique power of the algorithm, while in the same time experiencing the thrill of the ride under our birthright, as the organic children of this Cosmos.

PS. This article was mostly written by ChatGPT having as prompts the titles of the topics that I wanted it to write. It took me 1h to write and edit it, while normally, a typical article takes me more than 4h.

*You may join this audio event on March 8 and learn with practical examples of why there is so much hype around ChatGPT and Generative AI and how businesses can leverage it to create cutting-edge services.