The evolution: a simple illustration
By: Sirui Li
Tags: Industrialization, Technocentrism, AI, Illustration

In the last paragraphs of Tools vs. Assistants: Part II, I’ve talked about the evolution of the society as the technology develops, in order to explain how we should apply software agents into our applications.

Here I come up with some graphs to illustrate my model of machine intelligence in the process of society evolution:

Firstly, consider the industrialization of the way people finish a certain task, say, writing a thank-you letter. (Let’s assume that this task is well defined, though I’m not going to define it.) When it came into being, only a few of the smartest people could complete this task. A minimal level of intelligence is required for this.

The techniques and methodologies for writing thank-you letters developed very slowly, until one day tools were introduced. Dictionaries and phrase-books greatly helped people with this task and more and more people learned how to write thank-you letters.

Once the most intelligent people all learned this, it was considered very cool if someone understood how to write beautiful thank-you letters and this soon became one of the trending topics among people. Better techniques were developed and more effective tools were invented, like electronic dictionaries and dictionary software. This field began to flourish.

Soon, it became so easy to write thank-you letters that everyone with a right mind could complete the task with the help of certain tools. However, the most amazing thank-you letters are always written by intelligent human beings who put their mind to it.

One day, an automatic thank-you letter software (ATULS) was developed. This buggy but yet usable tool was a great breakthrough because machines started to complete the task by themselves. On the basis of ATULS, more and better software tools were developed. Professional thank-you letter writers are gradually replaced by the machines, as more and more people thought the letters written by machines were better than theirs.

The software tools pushed the quality bar higher and higher. Only the most excellent and experienced writers could done better than machines. But who cares? The majority of people no longer paid attention to how the letters were written. They just took it for granted.

From here, we came to the end of the industrialization process of the task. It’s almost completely automated and machine intelligence has greatly improved the productivity. Very few people will remain doing this task.

An extra note: Some may argue that the level of intelligence is lowered by tools and machines because they make the task easier. It is not the case because tools and machines are part of this intelligence requirement. Only by making use of the intelligence from the tools or the machines, human could complete the task with less intelligence. Thus the level of intelligence required for the task is not reduced.

Let’s see the broader picture. This one is fairly easy to understand. The society becomes more and more sophisticated. Since the invention of machine intelligence, tasks with low level of sophistication are gradually done by machines. But more sophisticated tasks are being created, human beings are working on the most sophisticated tasks which the machines couldn’t do.

So what our society looks like now? This shape looks strange as it shows the relationship between the other two axes: intelligence and sophistication.

Basically, more intelligence are required to solve more sophisticated problems. But tasks could be done in many ways, that’s why it actually shows a colored band instead of a single curve.

As we can see, the most difficult problems, i.e., the most sophisticated tasks are still being done by most intelligent human beings, because they’re new and machine performance are usually not acceptable.

While time goes on, machine intelligence will take up more portion in the lower parts and human work will be “pushed” farther and higher like a sword cutting through the surface. (That’s a pretty reasonable illustration of the word “break-through”.)

I have to emphasize that, as the title says, this is a very very simple model. There’re quite a few assumptions for these graphs, so you might find them naïve and inaccurate:

The society is always going forward smoothly. No anarchy, no crisis and no conflicts. There were no distinction of development levels among countries. All production activity could be divided into well-defined tasks. Though there is an infinite number of tasks, all tasks could be ranked by its sophistication. There would always be professionals or hobbyist who would never give up doing better work than machines in the tasks. That is to say, no task disappeared. There were always space for development and improvement. People could always find new jobs as the society become more and more sophisticated. There were no limitation for intelligence and sophistication. Machine intelligence would never surpass human intelligence. Machines could not generate more intelligent machines by themselves. As tasks became more sophisticated, even higher intelligence level were required to complete the task. That’s why the “curve” shape in the 3rd figure is concave, not convex. (But this does not really matters.)

The top five assumptions are very strong and not necessarily true. In fact, I personally doubt some of them because I don’t really agree with technocentrism. However, I do believe that, from the viewpoint of a technocentrist, this model could provide some insight on how technology works and develops.

P.S. I hope I could make a 3D model out of the three views from different axes but it seems very difficult to make it both accurate and illustrative. Perhaps I’ll make a video once I know how to do it.