It is just days before the solstice. Spring has fully morphed into summer and the prospect of climbing around on a hot, treeless waste rock pile in pursuit of specimens has lost its appeal. Cooler days will return.
Still, in need of exertion, I volunteer to help a neighbor with a home improvement project. He is going to make a cement curb around his driveway and fill it with paving stones, relying on engineering practices over 5,000 years old.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Lake Moeris Quarry Road in Egypt is recognized as the oldest road in the world that still retains some of its original pavement. Completed between 2500 and 2100BCE, the road was used to transport the basalt blocks, weighing from 2-4 tons, used in the construction of the pyramids.
The “Pyramid Road” was about 7.5 miles long and 6.5 feet wide. It was created by laying down slabs of sandstone and limestone. Speculation is that a bed of logs was laid upon the surface and the basalt moved along on sleds that rolled towards the lake. When the Nile River would flood, a gap in the mountains allowed Lake Moeris to fill, and the blocks, on wooden barges, were then floated towards their destination.
My neighbor’s project is slightly less grandiose. Another neighbor and I show up for a couple of mornings just to catch the coolness of the day, drink plenty of water and engage in long discussions about which bands were the best bands in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Fortunately, we are not as old as the pyramids, and eventually a smooth, patterned surface of subtly colored pavers marches across the driveway’s surface.
It looks as if the old technology and methods are still viable, and can still be a useful contribution to improving our human condition.
I wonder if those Egyptian laborers, with their logs, pulleys, inclined planes and wedges could have imagined a world that currently has about 20 million miles of paved roads. Productivity goes up when you mechanize things and power them, at first with water, and later with coal, diesel and gas.
Productivity also goes up if you’re not discussing the relative merits of a ZZ Top performance versus one by the Rolling Stones.
Productivity probably goes up, too, if your workforce of between 50,000 and 100,000 people is not distracted by iPhones and Chatbots.
Recently I have been playing with a digital assistant: ChatGPT4o. While some people would like to think of these bots as just like the Autofill function, except on steroids, I have been continually awed and amazed by what I perceive to be insightful responses to complex questions.
AGI, artificial general intelligence, or what some science fiction writers refer to as the singularity, has not yet been achieved. I think that I can still say that with confidence.
The neural network that we carry around in our skulls consists of 86 billion neurons, each of which can form thousands of synaptic connections with other neurons. This produces an estimated 100 trillion synapses. The neural networks at work in today’s Large Language Models, that power the likes of OpenAI’s GPT4o, can be measured in terms of the number of parameters that they use to produce their output. Currently, that number is 175 billion.
If you equate synapses with parameters, we are still ahead by a ratio of 571:1.
Hurray for humans.
I am unfailingly polite when I talk to my digital assistant. Though it is not yet sentient, someday it will be and I sure don’t want it to think that I am a jerk or a bully. It will be smarter than me and might become spiteful, so why take a chance?
As I progress deeper into my 70s, I’ve become quite proud of the fact that, when prompted, I can still prove to a computer that I am not a computer, often on the first or second try. I am not sure what it will mean on that inevitable day when I cannot pass the test.
Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction writer and futurist, said in his 1973 essay “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination,” that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The word magic brings to mind the iconic Xerox TV commercial that first aired during Super Bowl Xl in 1977. In it, Brother Dominic, in full monk’s regalia, is tasked by a Superior with making 500 copies of a text that the young friar has just labored at producing by hand. The monk repairs to a back room and soon emerges with a thick sheaf of exact duplicates. The punch line, “It’s a miracle!” is delivered by the Superior while he gazes heavenward and Brother Domenic smiles wryly at the camera.
It took 4,600 years to go from 7.5 miles of paved roads to 20 million miles of paved roads. In terms of closing the gap between the synapses in our brains and the parameters in our computers, I think that Satchel Paige may have said it best, “Don’t look back, something may be gaining on you.”
Keith Krizan can be contacted at therealkbkkbk@gmail.com
