First, a bit of a warning. This blog is less about fintech and investing, and more about philosophy. And it gets a bit trippy towards the end. So, if that’s not your thing feel free to wait for the next instalment which is likely to be about reassuringly familiar topics around tech, money and AI.
In the meantime, speaking of AI, let’s look at it for a moment in the context of determinism vs. free will.
For those not familiar with this philosophical paradox, I usually frame it as follows: If an all knowing being existed, given its all-encompassing knowledge of the universe, it would be able to run the tape forward one click and predict the future with ease.
We can think of this entity as God, or All Knowing Intelligence “AKI”, or the Conscious Universe, but in either case, given its vast intelligence and knowledge, the future would be knowable for It.
This being would know the state of every electron and synapse in our primate brains, and predicting what we were about to do next (write a blog perhaps?) would be trivial.
The paradox then states, if each of our actions are thus pre-ordained to this AKI, can we as humans really be thought of as having a free will? Or are we simply slaves to the interaction between the universe as it is today and the current configuration of the synapses in our brain, acting out our lives in banal predictivity?
But here’s where AI shakes it up.
The way I had approached this question for the vast majority of my adult life was that it was a trick question. From the perspective of the AKI, yes, all is knowable, but from our limited human perspective it is not. So as far as we humans are concerned, we need to act as if free will exists and get on with our lives. And whether an AKI or God exists takes us from the realm of philosophy, into theology.
Well, now that we have ever faster and more powerful computers ingesting seemingly unlimited data, rapidly connecting to those data sets, and with LLMs actually speaking to us like our next-door neighbour, it may be worth visiting the question of an AKI once again.
Given the power, the connectivity and access to near all-encompassing data, this AKI would be able to see and understand things beyond human capabilities yet explain that to us in our everyday language. And while perhaps not yet fully deterministic, it would certainly be able to predict things better than humans can. This almost takes us out of philosophy and into the present day. Think of AI already predicting your next Spotify song – it’s not God, but it’s close.
But let’s jump back into philosophy for a second and assume that the AKI is as the name implies, truly All Knowing. What does that mean for the age old questions?
For an AKI, the future is knowable. Similarly, the past, which has already transpired, is also knowable, and is merely a matter of good record keeping.
Given that both the future and the past are equally knowable from the perspective of this AKI, the distinction between past and future, at least the way we humans think about it, would start to collapse.
What we think of as past and future would be different states of matter and energy interactions in the universe. In simpler words, all that would remain would be an ever lasting yet ever changing present.
From this perspective, the concept of time itself starts to collapse, and reveals itself as an illusion that is amplified by our limited human minds that can remember the past but cannot predict the future. In fact, our human attempts at measuring time is really just an incomplete proxy for measuring change. Einstein’s discovery that time itself is relative can be thought of as a step towards saying time as we know it does not exist.
Only matter, energy, and everlasting forces of change do.
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