AGI and The Beginning of Infinity

The Enlightenment, Knowledge, and the Boundless Horizon

As we are on the cusp of breakthroughs that could lead to AGI by the end of this decade, or 2027 if some techno-optimists are to be believed, it is worth thinking about David Deutsch’s work - Explanations that transform the world.

I get a peculiar kind of intellectual dizziness every time I contemplate the universe through Oxford Professor David Deutsch’s lens. His book The Beginning of Infinity, is a masterwork in speculative philosophy and scientific rigor, which conducts an intricate assessment of ideas that urges us to reassess the very nature of progress, creativity, and existence.

My first attempt at reading Deutsch was whilst staying at a retreat on the serene Mount Kurama, outside Kyoto Japan. I was there on a 9 month sabbatical, spending time writing, reading and nurturing my mind and body. His book is not an easy first read, but it offers a wellspring of insight, rewarding those who persevere with a transformative understanding.

In fact, Deutsch’s thesis is deceptively simple: the Enlightenment of the 18th century inaugurated a process that could stretch indefinitely into the future, a sequence of purposeful knowledge creation limited only by our willingness to participate. Yet, the elegance of this argument belies its depth. This book will stretch your intellectual capacity, every answer spawns a dozen more questions.

His book is now stronly recommended by those in tech circles, especially personalities such as Naval Ravikant, and Sam Altman, who said, in one video, it was the one book he recommends everyone reads. Altman also said Deutsch’s “books have inspired me more than anyone else’s, and I think hold a big clue about how we get from here to AGI”. On Friday 20th December 2024, OpenAI, the company Altman leads announced o3, an AI system that achieved between 87.5 per cent and 91.5 percent on the ARC-AGI challenge, a phenomenal accomplishment. Clearly sparks of Artificial General Intelligence.

Good Explanations

To understand Deutsch’s vision, we must first grasp his definition of knowledge. For him, knowledge is not just information but information imbued with good explanations. Explanations that are testable, verifiable (empirical), and hard to vary without losing their coherence or predictive power. These are not mere justifications but robust frameworks that address problems effectively and align closely with observable reality. This is the kind of knowledge that fueled the Enlightenment, a period where static societies, those allergic to change, gave way to a culture that valued creativity and criticism. Deutsch's perspective is that the quality of explanations is fundamental to the advancement of knowledge and the scientific process.

"There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism."

A good explanation according to Deutsch is the theory of gravity. It precisely describes how objects attract each other based on their mass and distance. Changing any of the core components of the theory would lead to contradictions with observations. On the other hand, A bad explanation, would be the ancient myths that explain natural phenomena as the whims of gods. These explanations are easily varied, any event can be attributed to a different god or a different mood of the same god, and they don't lead to any testable predictions or deeper understanding. In essence, Deutsch argues that the quality of our knowledge depends on the quality of our explanations.

Knowledge as the Keystone of Progress

Deutsch highlights a fascinating paradox, while static societies did produce innovation, their pace was so languorous that individuals rarely noticed change within their lifetimes. The Enlightenment disrupted this equilibrium. By embracing open debate and valuing dissent, it unleashed a torrent of knowledge creation, setting the stage for exponential progress. For Deutsch, this shift wasn’t inevitable but contingent on specific cultural conditions, a fleeting alignment of values that could have occurred anywhere but happened, serendipitously, in Europe.

Creativity and the Machinery of Intelligence

Deutsch’s musings on creativity offer a tantalizing challenge to our understanding of intelligence. He argues that intelligence is not merely brute computational power. After all, six decades of tinkering with the Turing Test have yielded remarkable progress, as machines now rival human ingenuity in specific domains, yet still fall short of embodying the broad, creative intelligence that defines humanity. What sets humans apart, Deutsch posits, is creativity, the ability to generate new, explanatory ideas that aren’t predictable from past experience. Although this is beginning to change, for example with AlphaFold. In a discussion about AII in The Beginning of Infinity, Deutsch posits that there is no behavioral test of AGI. The so-called Turing Test isn't one, because there's no way of gauging by observation how much of the knowledge was in the input and how much was created by the program. Deutsch, nevertheless, is quite clear that we will build machines that can think, in the Turing sense, and that “we should expect AI to be achieved”. Writing in 2011, Deutsch stated:

“The field of artificial (general) intelligence has made no progress because there is an unsolved philosophical problem at its heart: we do not understand how creativity works. Once that has been solved, programming it (AGI) will not be difficult.” Afterwhich, “knowledge will continue to grow exponentially”.

His thought experiment involving AI is delightfully contrarian. Imagine feeding random numbers into an AI’s behavioral evolution program for robot locomotion. If creativity is indeed as fundamental to intelligence as Deutsch believes, such a system would flounder without inadvertent contamination from a human programmer’s ingenuity. If it succeeded, Deutsch concedes, it would upend his assumptions about the difficulty of replicating intelligence. Deutsch's thought experiment has prompted valuable discussion and research, which has advanced since he wrote his masterpiece. Yet, he highlighted the importance of understanding what we mean by "creativity" and "intelligence" in the context of AI. It has also shown that while purely random evolution might not be sufficient, more sophisticated evolutionary methods, combined with other AI techniques, can achieve impressive results.

This insistence on creativity as the linchpin of progress aligns neatly with Deutsch’s broader optimism. Problems, he argues, are inevitable but inherently solvable. For Deutsch, progress hinges not on the absence of obstacles but on cultivating the right kind of knowledge. The kind of knowledge that thrives in environments where creativity and critical engagement are nurtured.

The Multiverse: A Quantum Playground

No discussion of Deutsch would be complete without discussing his take on quantum mechanics and the multiverse. This is the part of his book that I least comprehend and have a fairly stagnant mind about. For Deutsch, quantum superpositions and the Schrödinger equation are not just mathematical abstractions but evidence of a many-worlds quantum multiverse. In this view, every physically possible event unfolds somewhere in an infinite branching of alternate histories.

What makes this concept more than a physicist’s playground is its philosophical resonance. Deutsch suggests that even our most fanciful fictions might be “fact” somewhere in the multiverse. Interference phenomena, where alternate histories subtly influence each other without transmitting information, serve as tantalizing evidence of this vast interconnected structure. This concept has profound implications for the possibility of progress. Deutsch argues that the vast computational resources offered by the multiverse provide the physical basis for potentially unlimited progress, as any physically possible computation can, in principle, be carried out. This makes the potential for knowledge creation and problem-solving effectively limitless. Perhaps it’s also a humbling reminder that our perspective is merely a single slice of a much grander, multidimensional reality. With the breaklthrough of Google’s Quantum chips people are already indicating Deutsch was right all along!

Memes, Static Societies, and the Genesis of Creativity

“Memes – ideas that are replicators”.

Deutsch’s exploration of cultural evolution offers a compelling narrative for how humans transitioned from static societies to dynamic ones capable of sustained innovation. He traces this shift back to the memetic emergence of human culture, where creativity evolved not as a means of invention but as a tool for faithfully reproducing existing memes. Ironically, this same mechanism eventually gave rise to the ability to create new memes, transforming humans into versatile architects of innovation.

“A culture is a set of ideas that cause the holders to behave alike in some ways. By ‘ideas’ I mean any information that can be stored in people’s brains and can affect their behavior”.

Static societies, with their slow pace of change, represent a kind of cultural stasis, a Sisyphean cycle where knowledge creation is stifled by resistance to scientific criticism. The Enlightenment shattered this mold by institutionalizing the principles of creativity and criticism, enabling humans to transcend their memetic chains. This, Deutsch argues, was the true beginning of infinity.

Optimism as Philosophy

Central to Deutsch’s worldview is a robust defense of optimism. For him, optimism is not a naïve hope but a philosophical stance, the belief that solutions to problems always exist, provided we seek the right knowledge. This perspective stands in stark contrast to deterministic or resource-bound theories of progress, such as those espoused by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Deutsch dismisses the idea that geography or resource luck can fully explain the West’s dominance. For him, the emergence of sustained knowledge creation could have happened anywhere, it just happened to arise in Europe first.

Toward an Infinite Horizon

The Beginning of Infinity is, at its heart, an invitation. Deutsch doesn’t merely present a theory of progress, he challenges us to participate in it. The Enlightenment, he argues, was not the culmination of human achievement but the starting point for an endless journey. Knowledge, creativity, and optimism form the essential triad that propels humanity forward, turning problems into catalysts for discovery and progress.

Deutsch offers a new worldview, one where humanity is not a passive observer but an active co-creator in an unfolding new world. This perspective invites us to embrace challenges and possibilities, compelling us to continuously rethink, reshape, and rediscover our evolving role within the cosmos. The only limits are those we impose on ourselves.

If the Enlightenment taught us anything, it is that even the most static of societies can be jolted into motion by the spark of an idea. And from that spark, an infinity of possibilities unfolds.

Stay curious

Colin