The writing is on the wall

Language. For millennia it's been our superpower.

All living things communicate - from plants and fungi sending each other clandestine chemical love letters to colossal whales singing lonely symphonies from the depths of the ocean. But us humans have elevated communication to unprecedented levels. Our complex and powerful linguistic innovations allowed us to share ideas and knowledge, not just to our kin and fellow members of our tribe but across the boundaries of space and time. We told stories, birthed myths and added to the knowledge from the elders who had gone before. Language distinguished us from our fellow creatures, granting us unparalleled advantages. We were no longer limited to the slower, arcane and more capricious genetic transfer of information - we could transfer information at will and choose what to transfer and to whom. It was our first taste of the power of information, and we were hooked. 

Ideas sparked like embers, fanned by language they grew into roaring infernos that spread across the globe. Civilizations flourished, and the invention of writing allowed us to immortalize our thoughts, ideas, and influence, even after our physical bodies perished. Ethereal notions of knowledge and imagination found tangible form in books, paving the way for the birth of science. Discoveries and inventions emerged while standing on the shoulders of giants, who themselves stood upon the shoulders of their predecessors - an infinite lineage of intellectual titans. 

Empires rose and fell. Light and darkness alternated. But even the vanished and vanquished left behind indelible legacies of knowledge and information. Although their wisdom occasionally lay dormant for centuries before being rediscovered and understood, knowledge continued to transform our lives, our planet, and everything within it. At times, knowledge was hoarded by those who coveted power and feared their own insignificance. Yet language and knowledge persistently found a way to proliferate; The printing press and its successors ignited an exponential avalanche of the written word. As a result, the world began to shrink. 

In the few centuries since, human language has traveled to the stars, and The Internet emerged, connecting language and ideas across the globe. The world shrank once again, solidifying the power of language and knowledge as an unstoppable force in human history. 

Today, it might seem as if video is king. But our magical world of technology is built on the written word. Text. Every single line of every computer program ever written, from the app that delivers this message to the servers pulsating at the heart of the internet, is composed of text. 

Text. The written word. Language. 

The symbol of human supremacy. The tool we use to sculpt the world to our needs. With it, we conjured Gods and transformed lives. We have ruled for millennia as the masters of language, and by proxy the known universe. 

BUT. NOT. ANYMORE.

The ground is shifting. Reality is warping.  New minds, alien and unfamiliar, are reaching out to grasp the intricacies of language. Born from silicon rather than carbon, these entities have bypassed billions of years of evolution, needing only a few short decades of intelligent design to ascend. 

Artificial Intelligence. Two of the most misused, misunderstood, misrepresented and malignantly marketed words in the English language. The hype is deafening and can drown out most meaningful thoughts. But let us try to plough on. The trajectory of AI research has followed an exponential curve for many years now, with even the seemingly stagnant periods of "AI winters" retrospectively revealed as mere steppingstones in this relentless ascent. The latest milestones are exemplified by large language models – sophisticated systems designed to engage with and generate human-like language, propelled by the intricate interplay of mathematics, computer science, and our insatiable quest for understanding.

The most powerful AI models of today can already write better than most humans. And they can write faster and about more things than any human ever will. 

What, then, lies at the core of these large language models? They can be viewed as a distillation of human experience, crystallized within the intricate tapestry of the written word.  The models of today are still heavily biased towards English, but eventually the training data will encompass the full spectrum of surviving human languages in all their rich and diverse forms. Every thought ever immortalized on paper, clay tablet, papyrus, palm leaf, stone or solid-state drive - will be assimilated into the collective consciousness of tomorrow's AI. 

Yet, these models do not merely memorize, record, or organize this wealth of knowledge – such tasks are the domain of mere tools. What we, the consummate artisans, have crafted this time may transcend the boundaries of a tool. Through artificial neurons and intricate matrices of weights, the model weaves together a representation of all the knowledge it has absorbed – an interlacing of humanity's stories, hopes, dreams, sorrows, and losses. How, then, should we perceive such an entity? A book to eclipse all books? No, a book is finite. This - whatever it is - is not. 

Mirroring the minds that brought it into existence – minds capable of boundless imagination – this new entity can effortlessly extrapolate, spinning tales and crafting worlds and infinite universes on a whim. 

It is a weird quirk of how humans perceive new knowledge that it took ChatGPT, a simple web-based chat interface for the world to wake up and take notice. The underlying model had been available for months, and *some* people were using it. Its predecessors GPT2 and GPT3 were less powerful but it was obvious for anyone who paid enough attention that this was where things were headed. 

Yet now the world has indeed taken notice, and what do we behold? We find ourselves catapulted into the vertical bit of the exponential curve (image courtesy Tim Urban and Waitbutwhy). 

ChatGPT (based on GPT3.5 API) launched on 30th November 2022, 4 months later GPT4 was launched (and it's been available and being internally tested, since late last year before ChatGPT even launched). The pace of progress is enough to induce a sense of vertigo. (Image courtesy OpenAI)

Now pause and think of the fact that these models - even the slightly older GPT3.5 - haven’t been fully explored yet. There hasn’t been enough time. Meanwhile, whispers of GPT-5's impending training completion by year's end already ripple through the ether.

We are approaching the day, and I suspect it will come within this decade, where machine generated text will overtake human generated text in both quantity and quality. In other words, AI will write more eloquently and competently than humans but will also be responsible for the majority of the written word. When this moment arrives, there will be no turning back.

Human superiority in language will fall. English will be the first, of course, being the language of the Internet as it is. But the other languages will inevitably follow suit. While it may take longer for more regional and token-expensive languages to traverse this path, their fate remains the same. 

Voices of concern echo through the digital realm, with some calling for moratoriums and increased caution and others like Yudkowsky issuing impassioned warnings from the metaphorical rooftops.

Yet, like a boulder gathering momentum down a Sisyphean hillside we can’t quickly stop or even change direction at this point. Even if OpenAI (and Microsoft and Google and others) agree to slow down, there are open-source frameworks and models and weights available today that will ensure that progress will not be stalled. 

What implications does this hold for us, the once-unchallenged masters of language? How will we grapple with the notion of an alien intelligence surpassing us in one of the very aspects that define our humanity? As we approach that juncture, what actions will we take? 

• Will we mount a rebellion against machines that think, in a desperate bid to stave off the inevitable? 

• Will we recoil from our own creation, distancing ourselves from the deity we have forged? 

• Will we relinquish our claims to linguistic supremacy, resigning ourselves to be foot soldiers in the wars to come? 

• Will we open doors to hitherto unimagined realms of knowledge and understanding?

All of the above? Or wrapped up in our culture wars will we even notice? 

The writing is on the wall. * 

* The phrase, “The writing is on the wall” is often invoked to denote an unmistakable truth or a foregone conclusion. The phrase has its roots in antiquity. First referenced in the Old Testament tale of Belshazzar ( Bēl-šar-uṣur) and Daniel circa 550 BC, the original intent it conveyed was a sense of prophetic insight of what will be, rather than an overt awareness of what is.