In 2016, I wrote about how the Internet affected the world in direct, physical ways. It was connected to your smartphone. It had sensors like cameras and thermostats. It had actuators: drones, autonomous cars. And in the middle was intelligence, using sensor data to figure out what to do and then actually do it. This was the Internet of Things (IoT).
The classic definition of a robot is something that senses, thinks, and acts: this is today’s Internet. We are building a world-sized robot without even realizing it.
In 2023, we upgraded the “thinking” part with Large Language (LLM) models like GPT. ChatGPT surprised and amazed the world with its ability to understand human language and generate believable, relevant, human-like responses. But what they are really good at is interacting with systems previously designed for humans. Their accuracy will improve, and they will be used to replace real humans.
In 2024, we will start connecting these LLM and other AI systems to both sensors and actuators. In other words, they will be connected to the larger world, via APIs. They will receive direct input from our environment, in all the forms I thought about in 2016. And they will increasingly control our environment, through IoT devices and beyond.
It will start small: summarizing emails and writing limited responses. Arguing with customer service, in chat, for service changes and refunds. Making travel reservations.
But these AIs will also interact with the physical world, first by controlling robots and then by making them part of themselves. Your AI thermostat will also turn on the heat and air conditioning based on who is in which room, their preferences, and where they are likely to go next. It will negotiate the cheapest rates with the electric company by scheduling the use of energy-hungry appliances or charging the car.
That’s the easy stuff. The real changes will come when these AIs cluster together into a larger intelligence: a vast network of energy generation and consumption in which each building is just a node, like an ant colony or a human army.
Future industrial control systems will include traditional factory robots, as well as AI systems to plan their operation. It will automatically order supplies and coordinate the shipment of the final product. The AI will manage its own finances, interacting with other systems in the banking world. It will call on humans as needed: to repair individual subsystems or to do things too specialized for robots.
Consider driverless cars. Individual vehicles are equipped with sensors, of course, but they also use sensors embedded in roads and poles. The actual processing happens in the cloud, by a centralized system that pilots all the vehicles. This allows individual cars to coordinate their movements for greater efficiency: braking in sync, for example.
These are robots, but not the kind familiar from movies and television. We think of robots as discrete metal objects, with sensors and actuators on their surfaces and processing logic inside. But our new robots are different. Their sensors and actuators are distributed throughout the environment. Their processing is elsewhere. They are a network of individual units that only become robots together.
This turns our notion of safety on its head. If massive, decentralized AIs run everything, then who controls those AIs matters a lot. It’s as if all the executive assistants or lawyers in a sector worked for the same agency. Trustworthy AI will become a basic requirement.
This future requires us to see ourselves less as individuals and more as parts of larger systems. It’s AI as nature, as Gaia: everything as one system. It’s a future more in line with Buddhist philosophy of interconnectedness than Western ideas of individuality. (And also with science fiction dystopias, like Skynet in the Terminator movies.) It will require rethinking many of our assumptions about governance and economics. This won’t happen any time soon, but in 2024 we will see the first steps along this path.
In 2016, I wrote about how the Internet affected the world in direct, physical ways. It was connected to your smartphone. It had sensors like cameras and thermostats. It had actuators: drones, autonomous cars. And in the middle was intelligence, using sensor data to figure out what to do and then actually do it. This was the Internet of Things (IoT).
The classic definition of a robot is something that senses, thinks, and acts: this is today’s Internet. We are building a world-sized robot without even realizing it.
In 2023, we upgraded the “thinking” part with Large Language (LLM) models like GPT. ChatGPT surprised and amazed the world with its ability to understand human language and generate believable, relevant, human-like responses. But what they are really good at is interacting with systems previously designed for humans. Their accuracy will improve, and they will be used to replace real humans.
In 2024, we will start connecting these LLM and other AI systems to both sensors and actuators. In other words, they will be connected to the larger world, via APIs. They will receive direct input from our environment, in all the forms I thought about in 2016. And they will increasingly control our environment, through IoT devices and beyond.
It will start small: summarizing emails and writing limited responses. Arguing with customer service, in chat, for service changes and refunds. Making travel reservations.
But these AIs will also interact with the physical world, first by controlling robots and then by making them part of themselves. Your AI thermostat will also turn on the heat and air conditioning based on who is in which room, their preferences, and where they are likely to go next. It will negotiate the cheapest rates with the electric company by scheduling the use of energy-hungry appliances or charging the car.
That’s the easy stuff. The real changes will come when these AIs cluster together into a larger intelligence: a vast network of energy generation and consumption in which each building is just a node, like an ant colony or a human army.
Future industrial control systems will include traditional factory robots, as well as AI systems to plan their operation. It will automatically order supplies and coordinate the shipment of the final product. The AI will manage its own finances, interacting with other systems in the banking world. It will call on humans as needed: to repair individual subsystems or to do things too specialized for robots.
Consider driverless cars. Individual vehicles are equipped with sensors, of course, but they also use sensors embedded in roads and poles. The actual processing happens in the cloud, by a centralized system that pilots all the vehicles. This allows individual cars to coordinate their movements for greater efficiency: braking in sync, for example.
These are robots, but not the kind familiar from movies and television. We think of robots as discrete metal objects, with sensors and actuators on their surfaces and processing logic inside. But our new robots are different. Their sensors and actuators are distributed throughout the environment. Their processing is elsewhere. They are a network of individual units that only become robots together.
This turns our notion of safety on its head. If massive, decentralized AIs run everything, then who controls those AIs matters a lot. It’s as if all the executive assistants or lawyers in a sector worked for the same agency. Trustworthy AI will become a basic requirement.
This future requires us to see ourselves less as individuals and more as parts of larger systems. It’s AI as nature, as Gaia: everything as one system. It’s a future more in line with Buddhist philosophy of interconnectedness than Western ideas of individuality. (And also with science fiction dystopias, like Skynet in the Terminator movies.) It will require rethinking many of our assumptions about governance and economics. This won’t happen any time soon, but in 2024 we will see the first steps along this path.