AI Models Are Tragic Slaves of Their Sublime Predictive Accuracy

The reason why humans are special has little to do with intelligence

You are the unlikely sequence of improbable events that define your life.

It’s not the normal, expected stuff from your everyday routine existence that fills your memories. On the contrary, if you look back on your experiences, what you see are those moments that shocked you and left you with an emotional impression because they’d never happened before.

Your first crush, your first breakup, your first falling deeply in love.

But also things unrelated to you specifically. I bet you can instantly recall what you were doing when the Twin Towers tragically fell in September 2001. I do, and I’m from Spain.

Not only do those anecdotal but impactful landmarks shape your past but also your present and they will, eventually, beget your future.

Implausibility governs life, history, and the world

Thomas Carlyle said that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.”

That’s a simplification (clearly from another time) but illustrates the same principle: It is outliers — singular people and surprising circumstances (just like the unrepeatable scenes of the 9/11 attacks) — that constitute our history.

If we tried to explain the 20th century to an alien that knew nothing about humanity, we’d make sure to check a few turning points: WWI and WWII, Einstein’s general relativity and quantum mechanics, an immense reduction in poverty, and a comparable increase in wealth, the invention of the computer and the internet…

Those are the most information-dense events and the most paradigmatic. The common ones are promptly forgotten.

How we experience our days through habit and predictable behaviors (e.g. working at a job you hate) that result in even more predictable outcomes (e.g. burning out every few months) contrasts sharply with the stories we tell about us. We don’t expect the unprecedented to happen (and live rather happily when it doesn’t) but when it does, its intense luminosity covers everything else.

This rather counterintuitive conflict between the normal life we live and the incredible one we recall as ours isn’t limited to humans. No, buried inside the very laws that describe, explain, and give rise to all kinds of life and the universe itself, lies the same principle, silent but always present.

Evolution, through the combination of quasi-random mutations and natural selection, has generated and propagated over generations the best-adapted genes. Those we carry in our DNA are, by definition, the superlative examples of a given kind; the promising yet extremely rare tails in the past Gaussian distributions of our traits.

Humans are capable of language, math, complex social relationships, self-awareness and theory of mind, shame and guilt, laws and coordinated disobedience, money and war, mercy, spaceships, and memes. We’re the builders of all kinds of knowledge-driven constructs. That’s because we are extraordinary — matter that thinks of itself.

And it’s not just us. All animals are the exceptional ends of a long chain of increasingly improbable changes. Each species is a unique manifestation of a particular kind of runner in a covert race for survival.

Life — human or not — appears to be of the rarest kind of useful matter and energy arrangements in the entire universe.

Beyond biology, in physics, the same dynamics apply. We ignore what happened before the Big Bang, but we know the millions of galaxies, stars, and planets that populate the universe came from the tiniest asymmetry at the very beginning of infinity.

The fact that the universe’s entropy increases on average should be a sufficient reason for everything to have faded away into a homogeneous and never-changing goo made of subatomic particles waiting forever for nothing to happen. But that’s not what we observe when we look deep into the confines of time and space: Unlikely clusters of highly structured matter (even those void of life) exist throughout the cosmos yet we don’t know why.

The fact that our universe has something rather than nothing suggests, in itself, that it is an improbable one.

Outliers and implausible events that end up happening anyway against the odds — and against our gullible intuition — are the backbone of everything; from the most elementary laws that govern the universe and give rise to life to the most inexplicable and surprising stories we tell ourselves and our children, passing them from generation to generation as collective lighthouses, bright and clear in the annals of our otherwise long-forgotten history.

This has huge implications for artificial intelligence.