Perpetual Motion, Superintelligence and the Inaccessible Game

Imagine in 1925 a world where the automobile is already transforming society, but big promises are being made for things to come. The stock market is soaring, the 1918 pandemic is forgotten. And every major automobile manufacturer is investing heavily on the promise they will each be the first to produce a car that needs no fuel. A perpetual motion machine.

An advert for a Fuelless car as rendered by ChatGPT after being fed the blogpost

Well, of course that didn’t happen. But I sometimes wonder if what we’re seeing today 100 years later is the modern equivalent of that. This week it was announced that Yann’s leaving the FAIR lab he founded. And one can’t help but wonder if the billions that Zuckerberg is now investing in superintelligence are the modern equivalent of arguing for perpetual motion.

Why might this be the case? Well, that’s where entropy comes in. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy always increases. So we can’t have motion without entropy production. How might we make an equivalent statement for the bizarre claims around superintelligence? Some inspiration comes from Maxwell’s demon, an “intelligent” entity which operates against the laws of thermodynamics.