It seems we may have moved one step closer to the Singularity — or the Apocalypse.

Research company DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google’s parent company) has created something called AlphaCode, a software system which writes software.

Some think this is a step toward true Artificial Intelligence (AI), a machine you can discuss the meaning of life with, which Elon Musk calls the biggest existential threat to humanity.

He’s hardly alone. Thinking machines have been a staple of Science Fiction for generations now and a good thing too. Because we need to consider those speculations if we are indeed on the threshold of a breakthrough in machine intelligence.

First of all we’re talking about “strong” AI, human-like self-aware consciousness, as opposed to “weak” AI, programs which only simulate human decision-making but never daydream.

Speculations involve how we might get there and what such a powerful intelligence might be like when and if we do.

Would it be benevolent, malevolent, or indifferent to us?

Would it be like Isaac Asimov’s robots, designed with an imperative to protect and serve mankind?

Or would it be like Skynet in The Terminator series, implacably hostile to humanity?

And how would machine intelligence arise?

By design, or perhaps even by accident?

Writers Robert Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke imagined a computer or a distributed network of computers becoming self-aware when the number of circuits equaled or surpassed the number of synapses in a human brain.

But we’re probably about there now and so far no sign of intelligent activity in the world-wide hardware network.

Of course a super-intelligent computer might just be smart enough to be discrete about its existence…

For what it’s worth, I don’t think so. Years ago at a cognitive science conference in Bulgaria an Irish scientist told me he’d become convinced consciousness goes all the way down to the quantum level, where reality gets really strange.

More recently British mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate Sir Roger Penrose said he believes whatever conscious is, it’s not computational.

If I understand this correctly it means we’ll never get there by piling circuits together. Perhaps never, period.

Oh we have systems which act almost intelligent and will improve. But my understanding is that such systems use a brute force approach to problem solving. A computer with the chess programs that are beating grand masters now can run millions of simulated games and pick the best from them in a fraction of a second.

That’s not how a chess master plays, even if we don’t quite understand how he or she does.

But there’s a way I think it might happen, and you’re participating in it right now if you’re reading this online. The possibility The Matrix films just missed noticing, human brains augmented by machines.

If you remember in The Matrix the machines had enslaved humanity to harvest their bioelectricity to run itself, which is a really weak plot element.

In a review I proposed the machines needed to be hooked up to organic brains to be self-aware, not exactly slavery but more like an evolving symbiosis. That without brains they’d just be regular dumbware. I’m still waiting for the Wachowski’s to contact me with an offer for my idea. Any day now.

And I wonder, isn’t that what’s happening now?

We’re all networking our brains via social media, though the interface is our eyes and fingers rather than direct brain-to-machine connections.

Who knows how we’ll connect in the future?

If we can learn to be smarter about it, maybe we’ll have a future after all.

— Steve Browne is a former reporter and contributor to the Marshall Independent