The Future of Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems

In or around 2050 machine learning systems (as distinct from “artificially intelligence” systems) will dominate human cognition in its ability to engage in generalized learning tasks.

Machine learning is already more capable at generating superior knowledge and reasoning than humans at directed task and with curated datasets. ML algorithms can today augment humanity to be better writers, better players in games of logic and strategy, even better artists and surgeons!  The next major frontier in ML will be the development of algorithms that are able to autonomously access generalized datasets and rapidly learn to pattern-match to adapt to novel stimuli. The world is drowning in what could be called “dark data”, and as the use of connected sensors rises exponentially in everything from shirts/shoes to buildings and even natural environments it will become ever more evident that corporations, interest groups, and governments will require learning systems that ‘learn how to learn’.

Over the next century the rise of these algorithms will mean the virtual end of what Western people, today, consider privacy and autonomy. Our cultures live in the transition period between Panoptic societies and Control societies – and we’re rapidly moving toward Control. In his essay, Postscript on the Societies of Control, Gilles Deleuze made an early – and in some ways naïve – attempt to classify and outline the mechanisms that will produce order in the future: a future where everyone is watching at all times, and every (important, political or sociocultural) action is directed. He proclaimed the death of individual and the dawning of the dividual. Participation in advanced societies of the future will require the dissolution of the individual, who will come to relinquish their sovereignty over decision making to intelligent systems and allow intelligent devices to shape choice sets. This will happen mostly voluntarily, and – importantly – become much more distributed and autonomous, portending the death of bureaucracy. Those who cling to centralization like the European Union and China are already suffering technologically and socially and will rapidly fall into irrelevance if they choose not to reform.

Alongside this development, as we already see in its infancy, will be splinter movements aimed at providing digital sovereignty to pseudonymous identities. What has been called ‘web3’ has been built on this premise and technologies like Urbit and concepts like the Network State facilitate interactions that allow those who wish to define their level of participation in intelligent networks to do so. Those who are radical in their pursuit will spend a lot of time curating their experiences and guarding themselves.  At the moment this takes a high level of intelligence, but it will come to only require elevated levels of investment of time and capital.

The shape of the world of the future will simultaneously be the dissolution of identity brought about by the domination of intelligent systems in routine daily life and the explosion of identities in hyper-Nomadic cultures that are digitally native. The dividual of the future will live multiple lives, some entirely independent of each other, as they transition between networks.