This piece originally appeared at Hyperdimensional.
“There’s an avalanche coming,
Don’t cover your eyes.
It’s what you thought that you wanted,
It’s still a surprise.”
Vampire Weekend, “Unbearably White”
“I’ve grown not to entirely trust people who are not at least slightly demoralized by some of the more recent AI advancements.”
Tyler Cowen (October 13, 2024)
Introduction
I first became “AGI-pilled,” meaning that I began to grasp the profound promise of mechanized intelligence, sometime in the early 2000s. I was a quirky kid, and I liked to use the computer. I especially enjoyed using the computer to learn about computers. If you did that in the early 2000s, it was hard to avoid websites and IRC groups that talked about AGI. There were dark visions of an AI future, just as potent as they are today. But there were positive visions too. One of the ones I remember most fondly is a 1987 video from Apple, putting forth a hypothetical future product called “Knowledge Navigator.”
The Knowledge Navigator was not billed as an AI. Instead it was a hardware device, resembling an iPad, except that in Apple’s vision at the time, it would lie flat on the user’s desk. Running on that hardware was a virtual assistant (a man in a bowtie—I think I will always imagine our best AIs wearing bowties because of this). The virtual assistant could place and screen video calls on the user’s behalf, synthesize large quantities of academic research and other online content, and even use that information to create new knowledge. Apple imagined that you’d communicate with this device almost entirely through voice. The Knowledge Navigator was not just a computer; it was a colleague.
Ever since I saw this video sometime in the early 2000s, this is the tool I craved the most. Every time a major new general-purpose tech product came out, some part of me would compare it to the ideal of the Knowledge Navigator in my mind. For nearly a quarter-century, nothing ever quite lived up. The first iteration of ChatGPT was a huge step forward, but still far short of what was needed to achieve the vision. ChatGPT is like a photograph of the internet—a lossy artifact. It cannot, on its own, retrieve obscure information beyond what is stored (imperfectly) in its parameters. Then we got search tools like Perplexity, but these too were flawed. Though Perplexity has improved, it still feels like a summary of the top Google results on a topic than it does like a true colleague. For the last two years, the Knowledge Navigator, though closer than ever, still felt just out of reach.
Continue reading at Hyperdimensional.
