No Mind Is An Island: The Rise of Agentic AI

One of my favourite movies is 2001: A Space Odyssey, and where HAL is an all-powerful AI entity which can reason and make its own decisions in order to achieve its objectives. Unfortunately, for Dave, this means that HAL considers Dave a threat to the mission and decides to “ditch” him. This is the scary world of AI that we are entering.

At some point in the future, we may reach the AI singularity point, and where machines will be more intelligent than us. With this, they will be able to pass the Turing Test, so that humans will not be able to differentiate between a human and a machine.

But, if we believe the science-fiction approach to the AI singularity, we often see it as a single, all-powerful machine that can reason as well as the human brain. As humans, we can often think about a complex problem for a long time, and not come up with an answer. To solve our problems, we often form “societies of thought” where we debate, disagree, verify, and then reconcile. In this paper, the authors propose that the model of AI singularity is one which involves these interactions [here]: