Omega Point Prompt Engineering
Arthur C Clarke, the famous science fiction writer, once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. The technological level at which our world operates today is simply staggering. One might daresay, magical.
We live in a world of thinking machines. Asking whether a computer can think, is a lot like asking whether a submarine can swim. The answer to both questions is “Yes, but differently.” Yes, a submarine can swim, but differently from a fish. Yes, a computer can think and be creative, but differently from a human.
It would help, I suppose, to clarify what we mean by “creativity.” I would suggest that creativity is the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable. This would imply that creativity is subjective. Society will decide whether something is creative or not.
This definition of creativity aligns closely with Howard Gardner’s definition of intelligence. Gardner, who is an American developmental psychologist and Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, says Intelligence is the ability to create products of value in society. Thus we see, that not only is intelligence similar to creativity, but that they are both contextual. According to Gardner’s influential Theory of Multiple Intelligences, there are different ways of being intelligent: the ability to sing and dance, read and write, make art and music, play sports and instruments, introspect and self-reflect, emote and role-play are all different ways of being intelligent. Traditionally, if a student did well in English, Mathematics, and Science, they were considered intelligent.
However, the Theory of Multiple Intelligences categorises Intelligence into discreet types: linguistic, musical, interpersonal, logical, visuospatial, and kinaesthetic. In this earlier series of articles, we explored how we already have AI that can exhibit these human intelligences. Until recently, we could still claim that we had no AI equivalent for three other intelligences that Gardner had identified: intrapersonal, pedagogical, and existential.
While that may have been true in the past, it is no longer valid today. Things have changed dramatically with the advent of Chat GPT and other Generative AI. We live in an age where we can use words as art to conjure up new worlds and construct new realities by simply using the right prompts.
The new engineer is the “prompt engineer”, where a prompt is any sequence of words or phrases we use when we interact with AI to create new art using Generative AI, which is essentially a type of AI that allows us to create new content (images, poems, songs, codes, essays etc.).
Generative AI is revolutionising how we experience the internet and the world around us. According to Statista, Global AI investment surged from $12.75 million in 2015 to $93.5 billion in 2021, and the market is projected to reach $422.37 billion by 2028. Generative AI may well be one of the biggest drivers of human productivity since the steam engine in the industrial age.
Generative AI (like Midjourney, Chat GPT, and Stable Diffusion) is not only democratising the creative process, it is also allowing for the emergence of new human-machine collaborations in ways which we have never seen before.
The big fear, of course, is that Generative AI will lead to the end of human creativity and the loss of jobs. However, the opposite will be true. Human creativity will greatly benefit from collaborating with AI and new jobs will be created.
How do we know this? Because we’ve been here before. We’ve seen in the past, that over a long enough time period, even technologies that obliterate whole categories of industry eventually become commonplace, and those people find other things to do. Consider the agricultural sector in America. According to the United States Census Bureau, in the early 1900s, more than 25% of Americans worked in Agriculture. Today, less than 2% of Americans work in agriculture. What happened? Automation happened. Machines began to do the jobs of humans. But, the thing to keep in mind is that new jobs have emerged — the likes of which we could never have imagined if we lived in the early 1900s.
What we could do is reframe the situation and analyse it from a different perspective. We could start to see data as the new food; deep technology as the new metals and minerals for industries; and the metaverse as the new cities of the future. The 22nd-century land of the free home of the brave will be the simulated worlds we create in Virtual Reality.
How would we create these simulated worlds? By using the next generation of generative AI. Ethnobiologist, Terence McKenna, once said the world is made of words and if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish. We live in condensations of the imagination. We are now able to use Generative AI to bootstrap complexity and shrink the lag time between what we can imagine in our mind's eye and what we can create in the phygital world.
If we could see a time-lapse of human progress over the last 100 years we would see images of human imagination spill out into the world: The Hubble telescope, the International Space Station, the laptop, the jumbo jet… were all once figments of the imagination — they existed only in our minds; today they’re a part of our reality. We were once hunting mastodons with stone-tipped spears, today we’re smashing subatomic particles in super-colliders. Human ingenuity and creativity are awesome to behold.
So, going back to the question of whether generative AI will lead to an amputation of human creativity, it’s important to acknowledge that when we can create anything we want, the bottleneck becomes our ability to express exactly what that is. Art has always been about the self-expression of human emotion. Now art can be that and more. We are starting to see Art as an expression of data sets and world views.
Humans crave novelty. We get easily bored. We get easily overwhelmed. We need gatekeepers and curators. The artists of the future will be not just creators of art but curators of art as well. In the future, idiosyncratic prompts will probably be what we copyright. Each future artist will have spent many thousands of hours perfecting their unique style, using a unique spell of words, to conjure up new worlds and new realities.
Where will all this lead to? I’m convinced we’re in the midst of a new renaissance. Think of all the music and podcasts on Spotify, all the art on Instagram and Flickr, all the videos on TikTok and YouTube, all the articles on Medium and Substack, and all the movies and TV serials on Netflix and Prime… We are witnessing an explosion of human creativity, an outpouring of the human imagination into the digital world the likes of which we have never seen before in the history of humanity
Ultimately, we will all be Semantic Search Bandits using words to enrich the human condition and create a wealth of new experiences.
How then do we create and nurture the Leonardo da Vincis of the future? The thing to remember is that da Vinci was not just a painter; he was a draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and, inventor and architect.
The key skill to possess will be interdisciplinary thinking and cross-curricular problem-solving. The artist of the future will also be a consummate wordsmith. This prompt engineer will need to have vast knowledge from diverse fields. We’re witnessing a new marriage — a new kind of coupling between biology and technology. The offspring of this union is the Imagineer.
We are all now central characters in a never-ending story. The next chapter in that story is about the rise of Artificial General Intelligence. Generative AI models like Midjourney and ChatGPT can contribute to the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by pushing the boundaries of language generation, creativity, and problem-solving. These models, through their ability to generate human-like text, can aid researchers in simulating and modelling AGI scenarios, allowing for the exploration of AGI capabilities and limitations. They can also serve as tools for training and learning, accelerating the understanding of AGI concepts and technologies.
By facilitating human-computer interactions through natural language processing, generative AI models can contribute to the development of more intuitive and seamless communication between humans and AGI systems. Additionally, these models can raise awareness about ethical considerations and promote responsible development and deployment of AGI technologies. As AGI development progresses, generative AI models like Midjourney and ChatGPT can continue to advance the field by contributing to research, learning, human-computer interaction, and ethical discussions, ultimately playing a role in the realisation of AGI.
Philosopher and public intellectual, Marshall McLuhan, says, “First we build the tools and then they build us.” We would do well to see Artificial Intelligence as a tool. An extremely powerful tool, no doubt; but a tool nonetheless.
In his book, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World, Oxford quantum computing physicist, David Deutsch, avers that we now have all the tools we need to make the jump to universality in gaining infinite knowledge.
Universality, according to Deutsch, is the tendency of gradually improving basic systems to make a sudden large increase in functionality and to become universal in some domain. For instance, the transition from pictograms to the alphabet allowed for a leap to universality in representing infinite words. The transition from Roman numerals to Indo-Arabic numerals allowed for a leap to universality in counting numbers. Other examples of Jumps to Universality include the movable-type printing press (which allowed us to create infinite books); DNA (which allowed for infinite life forms); and binary computing (which allows for the construction of circuits that can perform logical operations, which are the building blocks of all computations and therefore allow us to create infinite software apps and programmes).
Generative AI such as the current and future versions of Midjourney now allows us to make a jump to universality in our ability to create infinite digital worlds and digital artefacts. One might even argue that it allows us to make the leap to universal creativity.
And why is this relevant? Because it takes us one step closer in our infinite journey towards the Omega point. The Omega Point is a concept that was proposed by the French Jesuit priest and palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, which suggests a possible endpoint or goal of human evolution and the universe’s evolution towards a state of ultimate complexity and consciousness. According to Teilhard de Chardin’s vision, Omega Point represents a convergence or culmination of all existence, where the universe reaches its highest level of complexity, consciousness, and unity.
As generative AI systems become more advanced and capable of producing increasingly sophisticated and creative content, they will contribute to the evolution of art, literature, music, and other forms of cultural expression. This could lead to self-sustaining positive feedback loops and runaway bootstrapping of complexity that could, in the long run, have an impact on human consciousness, our understanding of reality, and our quest for infinite knowledge.
In the context of technology or artificial intelligence, runaway bootstrapping can refer to a scenario where an AI system, once it reaches a certain level of sophistication or capability, is able to rapidly improve its own capabilities without human intervention. This can lead to a self-reinforcing cycle of improvement, where the AI system iteratively improves itself and becomes more capable, leading to even faster and more significant improvements.
Futurist and Director of Engineering at Google, Ray Kurzweil, believes that the emergence of Super AI billions of times more intelligent than humans is simply a matter of time. Kurzweil has referred to this future AI as the “intelligence that permeates the universe,” which will enable humans to transcend the limitations of biology and merge with technology to become more intelligent, healthier, and longer-lived, ultimately leading to a post-biological era of existence.
Humans are a remarkable species. If we continue on this trajectory of technological progress we could well end up as substrate-independent minds impregnating the very fabric of spacetime with intelligence.
All that is, of course, in the distant future. In the meanwhile, we’ve got to explore what human transcendence will look like. How will we create humanity 2.0 — a new and better version of ourselves? A point for us to ponder is that we are now at the beginning of infinity. And if we truly understand infinity, we’d realise we will always be at the beginning of infinity.
