The Language of Deception

Chapter 10The Future

We live in a strange time in which, on a near daily basis, ideas that were previously considered science fiction are quickly becoming scientific fact. The once-forecast future is rapidly becoming the present, and the present is quickly fading into the past. Innovation and technological advancements are moving faster than ever before. Multiple accelerators are in play here. First, there is the well-known notion that computational power will continue to double year-over-year at an exponential rate.¹ And while certain physical limitations have resulted in the slowing of this growth rate, there still continues to be tremendous annual growth (Zhang, 2022). There is also, as previously discussed, a convergence in the field of machine learning on transformer architectures. For this reason, significant advances and breakthroughs in any subdiscipline of machine learning will often result in important breakthroughs across the entire field of artificial intelligence. Finally, we have now reached a point where advanced artificial intelligence is beginning to contribute to its own acceleration.

While we are not yet at a point where AI systems are autonomously creating better AI systems, they are assisting developers and data scientists in building the necessary code to rapidly build and prototype new capabilities. The combination of these factors is contributing to a technological landscape that is rapidly changing and evolving. As the technological landscape changes, ...