We Are the God of the Gaps (a little poem)
When the machines outperform us on every goal for which performance can be quantified,
When the machines outpredict us on all events whose probabilities are meaningful,
When they not only prove better theorems and build better bridges, but write better Shakespeare than Shakespeare and better Beatles than the Beatles,
All that will be left to us is the ill-defined and unquantifiable,
The interstices of Knightian uncertainty in the world,
The utility functions that no one has yet written down,
The arbitrary invention of new genres, new goals, new games,
None of which will be any “better” than what the machines could invent, but will be ours,
And which we can call “better,” since we won’t have told the machines the standards beforehand.
We can be totally unfair to the machines that way.
And for all that the machines will have over us,
We’ll still have this over them:
That we can’t be copied, backed up, reset, run again and again on the same data—
All the tragic limits of wet meat brains and sodium-ion channels buffeted by microscopic chaos,
Which we’ll strategically redefine as our last strengths.
On one task, I assure you, you’ll beat the machines forever:
That of calculating what you, in particular, would do or say.
There, even if deep networks someday boast 95% accuracy, you’ll have 100%.
But if the “insights” on which you pride yourself are impersonal, generalizable,
Then fear obsolescence as would a nineteenth-century coachman or seamstress.
From earliest childhood, those of us born good at math and such told ourselves a lie:
That while the tall, the beautiful, the strong, the socially adept might beat us in the external world of appearances,
Nevertheless, we beat them in the inner sanctum of truth, where it counts.
Turns out that anyplace you can beat or be beaten wasn’t the inner sanctum at all, but just another antechamber,
And the rising tide of the learning machines will flood them all,
Poker to poetry, physics to programming, painting to plumbing, which first and which last merely a technical puzzle,
One whose answers upturn and mock all our hierarchies.
And when the flood is over, the machines will outrank us in all the ways we can be ranked,
Leaving only the ways we can’t be.