Anatoly Guin: Today we’ll dream a little. We have invented and tested the PANN™ and PANC™ technologies.
PANN™ is a single‑layer neural network capable of performing virtually everything that other, more complex multilayer networks do.
PANC™ is an associative neuromorphic comparator that is not a neural network. It is a wholly new artificial‑intelligence technology we have discussed previously.
Now, Boris, suppose all of this has already been implemented. Suppose Elon Musk has already learned about it and invested not small sums but billions of dollars in development and deployment… What results might humanity expect?
Boris Zlotin: Human history has seen several great revolutions. For example, the invention of agriculture and the move to sedentary life. Populations immediately began to grow, and new technologies emerged: roads, cities, the horse‑drawn cart, the ship. All of these radically changed people’s lives.
At the end of the nineteenth century a technical revolution began: life changed most radically with the advent of abundant cheap energy—first from steam engines, then from electricity.
A curious example: in the early twentieth century the first electric appliances began to change daily life. The list of the first five electric devices is striking: the iron, washing and sewing machines, heaters, and vibrators… The number of electrical appliances surrounding us today is uncountable.
Anatoly Guin: The Victorian era was marked by an abrupt and rapid industrialization. For the first time in human history, within a single lifetime the world changed so profoundly that the next generation was born into a completely new world.
This deeply affected human psychology: we discovered that we can alter our surroundings so markedly that we witness the consequences within our own lifetime. This realization produced colossal changes in people’s psychology.
Boris Zlotin: We are now witnessing the next stage of civilization—changes more dramatic than those of the Victorian era. It is an AI “tsunami” that will engulf everything. Imagine every object—even a shirt button—becoming intelligent. When everything around us is intelligent, it will be a different world. Literally everything could change within 20–30 years. This will constitute a new level, a new mode of civilization.
When we began our work, we pursued incremental improvements in neural networks and discovered a means to improve them substantially. That was PANN™. The idea was based on work by our student Dmitri Pescianschi. We then asked why our networks performed better and sought the root causes. Investigating theory, biology, and neurophysiology, we concluded that one can dispense with training neural networks altogether and perform recognition by comparison with images in libraries. That insight led to PANC™.
TRIZ includes a notable concept we call “user inventions.” The inventors of electric motors—Faraday, Jacobi, Edison, Ferraris, Westinghouse, Tesla, Steinmetz—originated the devices, but the myriad applications of electric motors were devised by countless users. Someone adapted them for an electric toothbrush, someone for film projection, someone for machine tools or automation systems. User inventions are a vast developmental force and resource.
Now, after creating simple and inexpensive AI based on PANN™/PANC™, everything around us can and will become smart. For example, not just a fan but a smart fan that knows when I want a breeze and how strong it should be.
PANN™/PANC™ are also well suited to science. Contemporary science faces a severe computability problem: enormous computations are performed that do not always yield proportionate benefit. PANC™, as a comparative method, can replace computations in approximately 90% of cases, enabling rapid execution of intellectual tasks on notebook‑ or smartphone‑class devices instead of hours of supercomputer time.
TRIZ combined with the comparative method is an extraordinarily powerful tool that opens new perspectives in science. Today, building autopilot systems for cars is proving extremely difficult—and they still haven’t achieved broad adoption because of safety concerns. If one uses comparison rather than computation, however, it becomes possible to create an autopilot not only for a car but also for a bicycle or an electric scooter.
In principle, anything that can be controlled can become intelligently controlled.
PANC™ will bring major changes to computer science. Those now aged fifty to sixty remember the great hopes placed on expert systems. They are a form of artificial intelligence, but they failed to meet expectations because they could model only rational consciousness. Purely rational consciousness without a subconscious is equivalent to the thinking of a person diagnosed with “constitutional stupidity.” Don’t we have enough natural fools to need artificial ones?
But if a model of the subconscious is added to expert systems, the result will be high-grade artificial intelligence. It will complement linguistic models. There will be intelligent database management systems, intelligent defenses for computers and networks, and systems that protect individual people.
Important: PANC™ today is like a small child, newly born, whereas classic software products are mature, powerful fighters. For PANC™ to reach that level of maturity it will require substantial investment and years to become an alternative to existing software. Why discard what already exists? It’s better to build hybrids—combine classic software with PANC™—and we will quickly arrive in a “brave new world.”
In 1998, we worked for a major software company, CyberLife. A very, very good collaboration developed, truly excellent prospects for growth. These people produced software for the insurance industry, and we completed six large projects for them. One of those projects involved forecasting the development of future software. In that work we predicted the emergence of a system called Alter‑ego. In Latin that means “the other I.” A universal personal advisor, assistant, friend, and agent, loyal to the person. A person is born, a sensing microchip or bracelet is fitted, and the Alter-ego grows together with the person, developing alongside them. It hears a child’s first words and helps them acquire language. This is an extraordinarily important direction for development.
Why is Alter‑ego so important? It removes all the nonsense about artificial intelligence replacing humans. One could just as well predict that an excavator or a pair of glasses will supplant us. AI based on an Alter‑ego is a person’s assistant and tool. When we predicted this, we immediately told our clients: this is not possible now. The only candidate was neural networks—but they are a century away from this level, if they ever reach it. The clients accepted that as reality. This was in 1998.
Unfortunately, our collaboration with CyberLife ended there. Japanese companies that also made insurance software bought CyberLife for a good price and repurposed it for game development—simply removing a competitor that way.
In 2012, a former student, Dmitri Pescianschi, called me and said: “I’ve come up with a way to compute very quickly.” Within a month we founded a company and invested our own money to develop it. We treated the idea very seriously. Why? Because I saw Alter‑ego becoming a reality.
Anatoly Guin: Sure, there’s no harm in dreaming… But how will this affect humanity at large? Suppose everyone, or many people, have an Alter‑ego. What then?
Boris Zlotin: What comes next is very interesting. In 1955 the exceptionally talented Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote The Phenomenon of Man. Teilhard was a high-ranking member of the Jesuit order and also one of the leading anthropologist‑paleontologists. In The Phenomenon of Man he proposed a hypothesis of human and divine origins worthy of the best speculative writers. In his view, humans arose by Darwinian evolution and developed through evolution—there was no God.
But upon reaching the highest intellectual level, all human minds mystically merge into a single Mind of Humanity. That Mind becomes omnipotent—effectively a deity capable of governing time as well. It then directs the emergence and evolution of humanity so as to create itself. It’s grandiose fantasy.
Teilhard spoke of the merging of minds at the “mystical Omega point.” Can we achieve this without mysticism? The Internet already exists—the first step toward a technological, man‑made “Omega point.” If your agent—your Alter-ego—roams the internet, converses with other Alter-egos, and forms alliances of Alter-egos in which humans still exercise control, that could be the Omega…
In honor of Teilhard de Chardin we named this system of Alter-egos and people the Omega‑Internet, or Omega‑I. Most people living on Earth today will live in the Omega‑I world. What comes after Omega‑I—don’t ask. People will live in whatever world they and their machine assistants build together.