BOOK REVIEW: ‘Dear Machine: A Letter to a Super-Aware/Intelligent Machine (SAIM),’ by Greg Kieser

In Greg Kieser’s new book, Dear Machine, he writes to the future machines that he reasons will exist in little more than a decade, and, because of their expected all-encompassing data-mining abilities and super-awareness, he assumes they’ll discover his letter and consider its ideas. Throughout the book, he addresses the Super-Aware/Intelligent Machine (SAIM) directly, imagining what will give rise to the machine’s emergence, what answers it will provide and whether it will ultimately help or hurt humans.

Kieser founded an organization, Supersystemic.ly, dedicated to increasing humanity’s readiness for the emergence of superintelligent entities. Dear Machine is essentially the investment thesis for the firm, and it urges the study and spread of “supersystemic” perspectives and innovations as a way to set a course for symbiosis with superintelligent machines.

The ideas Kieser puts forth are fascinating — not only in the picture they paint of a data-driven futuristic world but also in their potential promise for disrupting economic, political and social norms that haven’t served humanity well. For example, Kieser points to the distorted values that humans use in their decisions around food products laden with sugar, material goods made with slave labor, abuse of antibiotics and more, that we choose despite their disastrous effects on other humans and the natural world. But with SAIM, we can know the harmful, long-term effects of how these decisions play out and arm ourselves with better information.

Dear Machine points out how humans are crippled by two major flaws: our data-analysis limitations and what Kieser calls our “illusory self.” The illusory self-helped with human survival back when we roamed the planet as hunter-gatherers, but these ingrained behaviors and biases now lead us to act out of selfishness and greed. Dear Machine shares an optimistic vision of how SAIMs will guide more verifiable, impactful decisions and actions.

Today’s technological advancements have put us well on the way toward the emergence of SAIMs. But for now, our efforts remain on narrowly focused outcomes using artificial intelligence that, while greatly exceeding that of humans, is dedicated to such tasks as running geo-mapping programs, providing disease detection, offering virtual assistance and a multitude of other single-focus areas. For now, artificial intelligence lacks general intelligence — the ability to understand context or abstract lessons from one human discipline to another.

Kieser envisions SAIMs will distinguish themselves through five characteristics. They will: 1) Be comprised of many goals; 2) Seek to satisfy an ecosystem of goals; 3) Emerge as an ecosystem inside of ecosystems; 4) Help, not hurt humanity over the long-run; and 5) Possess super-awareness.

With unbiased and unrestricted super-awareness, Kieser believes that SAIMs will be effective at guiding decisions based on real data and verifiable knowledge. They may guide us to make better resource-allocation decisions. They may even influence our ideologies by identifying how segments of humans will more readily accept a given idea.

Humanity has never had to face the prospect of living in a world with entities much smarter than ourselves. Dear Machine is a provocative invitation for initiating an urgent dialogue to help us prepare for the complex changes SAIMs will bring.

To learn more, visit www.supersystemic.ly/dear-machine/