What happens when computers are smarter than you

A few years ago I was working at a finance company doing quantitative stock algorithms and I remember hearing an interesting story.

Back in the early 2000’s there was some buzz around neural networks and their ability to be used to pick stocks.  The company at the time had invested some R&D into creating their own neural network algorithms to help with their trading.  The algorithm performed well and they apparently moved it into production.  However, it was quickly pulled back out.  Even though the trades were profitable, when investors asked why they had made specific trades the portfolio managers couldn’t give them a reason.  An “I don’t know” answer from your highly paid portfolio manager doesn’t instil a lot of confidence.

The neural network algorithm was in someways smarter than the portfolio manager, it could identify correlations in the stock market that could not be explained in terms the investors could grasp.

I believe there is nothing inherent to the bundle of neurons in your head that would make it impossible to replicate in silicon and software.  Furthermore, if it’s possible to replicate the average person’s brain then it’s possible to replicate a brain with an IQ of 200, and if that’s possible then perhaps it is also possible to simulate a brain with an IQ of 500 or 10,000! The ramifications of which are incomprehensible.

Over the last handful of years big strides have been made in the world of AI.  Facebook has face detection algorithms that are as good as humans, Google has self driving cars with a perfect driving record, publishing companies have algorithms to write news articles.

We are fast approaching a time when computers will be smarter than us all.  They will gradually pick off more and more tasks to be better than us until they are smarter in a general sense at virtually everything.

When I look at my profession of being a software developer, I can foresee a way for computers to make dramatic inroads to making even me obsolete. You take all the publicly accessible code online and feed it into a learning system. correlate issues and bug reports to the code fixes and it becomes possible to identify logical errors and bad practices, or autocomplete entire sections of code. Even without cutting out software developers completely, it seems possible to increase their productivity by an order of magnitude.

When a computer is smarter than me at programming, it will program itself.  I will be out of a job, and likely, so will everyone else.

When a computer is smarter than all of us, the entirety of human civilization will change.  We are currently unaware how a system a complex as everything on Earth will react, and that’s kind of scary.  Perhaps someone should attempt to forecast this future.  An economic forecast may have more weight to pull in political debate.