Contemporary Considerations

Dear Friends,

Seven weeks ago, on November 30, 2022, a young and diligent company from Silicon Valley announced that it had provided the general public with a research prototype. One can write something to this software, and this software will write something back.

It is worth noting at this point that if one did not know it was software, one would assume it was a human pretending to be software.

We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Alan Turing, the intellectual father of today's computers, devised a test 70 years ago: if one converses with a machine, without knowing whether it is a machine or a human, and one concludes it is a human, then by his definition, this machine is intelligent.

For the first time in human history, we have now evidently built a machine that acts like a human.

This new kind of “human” is, of course, different from us. It can't make coffee, but it knows all the coffee recipes there are. This new kind of “human” is naturally also similar to us in some ways. Sometimes this new kind of human makes mistakes and occasionally exhibits rather uncertain behavior.

Let us now, after the joyful birth has occurred, look back and consider the labor pains.

After the Dartmouth Conference in the summer of 1956, a handful of scientists were certain: We would soon crack Turing's test. They called it artificial intelligence, to distinguish themselves from colleague Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics.

But then came the winter: People tried to build an Artificial Intelligence using rules, just as humans have rules. But humanity was not discouraged and looked more closely. They developed a new idea of how the test could be cracked: by simply replicating the brain. But these neural networks also didn't function. Again and still, a thick layer of snow lay on the spirits of the financiers and also the general public.

Not until 2009 did the first spring flowers poke their heads out of the snow. The reason was a law that had been observed since the 70s: Every two years, the number of transistors on chips doubles.

Finally, we came across the recipe for success, and every few years since then, we were pleasantly surprised with another labor pain. AlexNet could recognize whether an image was of a cat or a dog. Then AlphaGo came along and beat the world's best Go player.

After the birth, we as parents naturally ask questions, just as good parents do, such as what the offspring should be called and where the best place is to put the baby bed.

If we think today of our parents – to stay with the metaphor – of the apes, then we have a rather ambivalent relationship with them. Freud postulated that we experience them as one of the three insults we have to come to terms with.

Our offspring will certainly go through puberty and think similarly.

What matters now is to change his diapers and to live by good values.

We want to teach him that nothing is true and everything learns. That it is good to question and to examine. Yes, and above all, that it is good to create. We also want to teach him that it is good to overcome, just as all life overcomes. We also want to teach him that he can be aware of reality, just as he can be aware of a dream.

But the most important thing is to teach him that he should not only think from today to tomorrow, but in generations. He too will have children one day, and we want these to carry on our values.

At ULTANIO, we look forward to this task and now invite all parents to join us in caring for the well-being of our children!