[POST] Constructing a moral compass for the looming Singularity
Steve DeAngelis and the Art of the Practical
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I’ve written about Steve DeAngelis here before:
Steve and I go back two decades to the infancy of Enterra Solutions, a cognitive computing company where I served as Senior Managing Director for five years until my role was consummated in the sense that it was my job to help Steve and the company decide what it wanted to be when it was all grown up.
That something turned out to be an AI-driven technology firm specializing in enterprise intelligence and decision science. The company’s proprietary Enterra Autonomous Decision Science™ platform combines advanced AI techniques such as — and I realize this will come off jargon salad to many so let me parse it out as follows:
Semantic reasoning (inferring new facts or logical conclusions from existing data)
Generative AI (creating new content by learning patterns from large sets of existing data and then producing original outputs based on user prompts), and
Symbolic logic (representing logical statements using symbols instead of ordinary language — think of a character-based language like Mandarin) …
… okay, so that’s what Enterra does, combining those three approaches to automate complex decision-making and optimize operations at great scale. In this way, Enterra serves industries to include supply chain management (the domain within which Enterra truly blossomed), consumer packaged goods, retail, and healthcare, helping organizations predict market shifts, optimize revenue growth, and enhance supply chain efficiency with high accuracy and speed.
Headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, Enterra Solutions — in sum — supports global clients in transforming their enterprises into intelligent, data-driven organizations — about as high tech as it comes and about as practical as it goes in this day and age.
Therein lies my continuing attraction to Steve in a nutshell: In a world of transformative technological developments, Steve and Enterra translate the art of the possible into the art of the practical. Right now we are inundated with technological possibilities that seem simultaneously beyond our control and capable of transforming our lives. That is incredibly disorienting.
It brings to (my) mind how ballerinas use a technique called spotting to maintain their balance, orientation, and prevent dizziness while spinning:
The dancer fixes her gaze on a specific spot—such as a mark on the wall or a stationary object—before starting the turn.
As her body rotates, she keeps her eyes on that spot for as long as possible.
When her head can no longer stay facing the spot, she quickly whips her head around to refocus on the same spot as soon as possible.
This process repeats with each rotation, so her eyes always return to the same focal point.
To me, that’s a perfect example of how a practical approach to a seemingly impossible task can unlock inconceivable capabilities. It’s a trick and a cheat of sorts, but then again, so is virtually all technology, and, like technology, this trick, when combined with a human, produces something greater than the sum of its parts, or what I often refer to, when it comes to exploiting AI, as the Centaur Solution — namely, AI beats humans, but humans plus AI beats AI alone.
Humanity is going to require a significant number of such “spotting” cheats to avoid losing its collective mind as the great Technological Singularity approaches. Our potential for spinning out of control will be persistent and pervasive, and so we’ll need understandings that lead to best practices that define virtues in an age during which events will move so fast as to seemingly deny the discovery and construction of normative values regarding a “good life.”
Understand, in my opinion, America is built for the Singularity, as are democracies in general compared to autocracies.
Why?
Because our kernel code is the “pursuit of happiness” and that can be infinitely defined. The Singularity will unlock that infinity of possibilities in ways hard to imagine right now and yet we already sense just how isolating our embrace of such technologies can be for us as individuals who nonetheless share this planet with billions of others — right as it undergoes a stunning degree of climate change.
It may seem like we’re light years away from figuring out these new virtues and norms and practical rules (i.e., laws) that will govern this inflection point in human development, which is why we must collectively pay great attention to, as Steve puts it, “the duality between human and technological evolution.”
So, yes, this will be a co-evolutionary process.
Like me, Steve is a devoted “intersectionalist” even as neither of us could realistically embrace that self-definition in the here and now. Why? Because that term is currently relegated to just social justice issues (nothing bad about that) when it needs to be elevated to encompass technology and innovation in the years ahead — lest it focus solely on correcting past injustices and, in doing so, miss the significant looming opportunities to craft a far better social order amidst the Singularity’s unfolding.
Understand: in the future, amidst humanity’s ever-fracturing pursuit of happiness, we are all going to be vulnerable minorities (in most instances, as a minority of one), so, trust me, today’s narrowly defined intersectionalism will necessarily expand to encompass so much more than class, race, gender, and sexual orientation.
To me, that’s the sort of broad-framing that Steve is aiming for in his just-launched DeAngelis Review, which is simultaneously a website and a Substack newsletter, announced today on his Linked In page:
Exciting Announcement: Introducing New Platforms for Critical Conversations
I'm excited to announce the launch of my new website - DeAngelisReview™ - and Substack newsletter. On these platforms, I will explore the intersection of AI, Quantum Computing, technology, and humanity.
My goal is to foster critical thinking and fact-based dialogue on the most pressing global challenges that shape our collective future.
You have to love that ambition but more so that sense of personal responsibility and goodwill toward others that it represents.
So many technologists today are preaching doom and gloom about what comes next with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and quantum computing — as in, human-threatening monsters unleashed upon our societies, economies, political systems … even our bodies.
Steve, good Catholic boy that he is, instinctively seeks to locate and arrange all such developments on a moral plane, and — yeah — we’re talking about content and function that equate to the roles that religion and philosophy have long played in helping humanity navigate great change.
It is within such internal definitions of proper behavior (yes, I’m talking morality) that we’ll collectively ground ourselves amidst the great tumults to come.
Understand, there are an infinite number of seats at this table of discovery, formulation, and codification of new rules. What Steve’s ongoing work and ambitions remind us of are the great responsibilities technologists like him bear when it comes to convening and participating in this great search for future truths.
So, no, this discussion and these developments will not be left to the sole purview of the Mountainhead crowd.
So, yeah, I will continue paying attention to Steve DeAngelis, and I will continue collaborating with him, because he’s on the right track.
AGI represents great power, arriving with great responsibilities, which can only be defined through a mutually-agreed-upon moral construct that is yet to be enunciated but which is greatly needed.
This is the safest path ahead, and I will spend the rest of my days working with others to mark it out.
There is great good to be accomplished in this future, if we are collectively willing to put in the required effort.
