The greatest threat to the destruction of humanity, according to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and the late physicist Stephen Hawking is AI or artificial intelligence.
Could they be right? Will AI (Artificial Intelligence) take over the world? Or have they been watching too many science fiction movies.
If anyone other than these three highly intelligent people had made the same statement, you could write them off as “crack pot pseudo scientists”
But given that these are three preeminent and highly intelligent people, you have to take this seriously.
First, what is AI?
Quite simply it is a type of machine intelligence. It already exists, Siri on iphone speech recognition and the vision recognition systems of self-driving cars are low level forms of artificial intelligence.
High level forms of AI would be self-learning machines, and perhaps even conscious such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in the Terminator,
or the robots in West World , which are at least as intelligent as humans. These don’t exist yet,
…but we are probably going to get there in this century.
Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google, is a famous futurist who predicted the rise of the internet and fall of the Soviet Union.
He believes that AI will be vastly more intelligent than humans by the year 2045 –
This is the point at which there will be nothing that humans can do, that an AI Machine will not be better at.
That’s less than 30 years from now.
Does this mean that, humans will be destroyed at that point?
No, it doesn’t mean that
Does it mean that humans may be redundant, or mostly useless?
Probably…yes.
If AI does become much more intelligent than humans, yes, they may possess the capability to destroy us, but the question is not, “can they?” –
The question is “would they?”
To answer this question, we have to figure out why they would destroy us.
They would not destroy us for fun – these would be highly logical intelligent beings. They would not be like humans, who sometimes kill to satisfy an emotional need, or for no reason at all.
There would have to be a reason.
For example, we are much more intelligent than ants, but we don’t go around killing ants for no reason. We only kill them when they encroach on our homes or threaten our comfort and health.
We also kill less intelligent animals to eat them.
Would our AI overlords need to eat us – highly unlikely. They will be powered by electricity, probably solar power, or fusion, which is limitless and highly efficient.
they wouldn’t bother with the highly inefficient forms of energy like consuming food or meat –
this form of energy consumption is highly inefficient, and converts very little of the food into useful energy,
and it comes with all kinds of problems such as the need to poop, and filter all the toxins contained in our meats through the liver and kidneys.
AI’s would likely be much better built than the organic machines created by billions of years of evolution.
On the other hand, it is quite possible that the AI machines may need us humans. Humans tend to be unpredictably creative,
and sometimes just illogically crazy.
This could work to the AI’s advantage. We could provide a source of “mutation” in the AI programming, that could create even more intelligent and creative AI’s.
…Would they kill us if we were encroaching on their ability to survive, or if we were “pests” like ants or rats are to us?
Well, I don’t think so. You see, this need to survive is innate in all biological creatures because we evolved that way.
Any creature that did not want to survive did not reproduce, so became extinct.
so presumably we would have programmed them to serve the needs of human beings.
Just like all computers are programmed by humans to do certain tasks, and compute with a set of algorithms,
the AI’s would have been created from this kind of programming as well.
And we will have taught them to serve human beings.
However, it is possible that some malicious human may program the AI to destroy humans, yes, they could.
But this would also mean the destruction of that malicious human too. It would be suicide.
This is not impossible, and I think this is what we have to be careful of.
AI will give us great power. It has the potential to solve most if not all our problems –
like finding a cure for cancer, finding ways to save our planet. But it will also have the power to destroy.
The question is…will we humans use that power for good? or will we use that power for evil?
If AI is used for evil, it is NOT the AI’s that will destroy us, but other humans.
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