Artificial Intelligence vs Mankind

In the old days, much before the modern age when science was relatively underdeveloped, people believed in spirits, demons, and ogres as they constantly lived in fear of being attacked or even eaten by wild animals.

It is not surprising that monsters, demons, evil spirits, werewolves, and the like were the stuff of their nightmares. As science developed and people's understanding of natural phenomena grew, mankind became the true master of all that it surveyed on Earth.

It was then that one's thoughts and attention turned to other worlds that might harbor life that may be superior to what is obtained on Earth. What if these life forms were to invade Earth and enslave its inhabitants or worse annihilate them all together?

A whole new genre of hair-raising science fiction stories, full-length books, movies, and television series stoked fears amongst hundreds and thousands, if not millions of people about aliens amongst us or a coming alien invasion.

There were thousands and thousands of UFO sightings and bizarre claims of encounters with alien beings reported from every part of the world. The US Air Force undertook an official investigation code-named Project Bluebook, between 1959 and 1962, to verify the claims of UFO sightings.

That threat may or may not ever present itself, but mankind today faces an existential threat that may be as catastrophic, as that of the takeover of our planet by hostile aliens.

I allude to the immense danger that we may have ourselves created for human life on Earth as we know it by inventing artificial intelligence.

Beware Artificial Intelligence

The reason that artificial intelligence may devour the very mankind that developed it is that it has been designed to think on its own autonomously, ultimately, without human intervention and oversight. The idea behind this is to harness its super efficiency to get tasks done on its own freeing up human beings to focus on things that are truly important to them.

The problem with this premise is that in creating intelligent machines capable of learning all the time and improving their abilities, they will inevitably develop a free will that may dictate them to adopt a course of action that may be disastrous to human life on earth as we know it.

They may, for example, decide that human beings are too greedy, rapacious, and likely to degrade the planet to the extent of making it unlivable and decide that the species needs to be eliminated in order to save the planet and its other life forms.

In other words, artificial intelligence or AI will in effect be like an alien race from another planet that views us as pests and vermin leeching the life out of our planet, and therefore, to be snuffed out like a farmer would get rid of weeds that threaten their crops.

There are those who decry the idea of resisting the spread of AI technology pointing to other technologies like printing, automobiles, airplanes, and computers having been assimilated by the human race in the past despite grave fears being expressed about their impact at the time of their introduction.

Such people need to realize that AI is different. Wholesale adoption of AI would mean handing over the keys to human existence to other life forms.

AI has the potential to interfere and decide for us in every single aspect of our lives-  jobs, the utility services we use, healthcare, entertainment, travel, and ultimately, what and how we eat, who we marry, and how we raise our children.

This is not a distant, dystopian nightmare, but something that we well might face in the coming decades considering the pace at which AI is developing and evolving.

Prominent people from different walks of life have been expressing their concerns about the dangers posed by the growing advances in AI technology. Tech and EV entrepreneur Elon Musk, for example, wants the use of AI heavily regulated, as it may end up being an existential threat to humans.

To him, the improvement of artificial intelligence is no less than "summoning the devil"[1]. Cognitive professor, Gary Marcus on the other hand believes that that day may come when AI-powered machines might commence a battle over resources with humans to ensure the survival of the former.

Renowned author James Barrat has even written a book whose title reads- "Our Final Invention; Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era." The most famous physicist of recent times Stephen Hawking has this to say about the immense danger posed by AI, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race”[2]

The breadth and sweep of the impact of AI on humans is going to be immense in the years ahead and will no doubt benefit us in myriad ways in the foreseeable future. It will help with things like complex decision-making, reasoning, high-level analytics, pattern recognition, speech recognition, language recognition, and the translation of languages.

We shall see its deployment across communities, vehicles, buildings, and utilities, as well as business processes and farms saving us valuable time and money and empowering individuals to live fuller lives. It could also benefit our healthcare systems and transform the formal and informal educational systems.

All of this would be very well till the time AI is under human control, but what about the day that it breaks free of that and exercises its own free will based on what it thinks should be its priorities? In creating AI, have we unwittingly created a Frankenstein's monster?

[1] https://time.com/3614349/artificial-intelligence-singularity-stephen-hawking-elon-musk/

[2] https://time.com/3614349/artificial-intelligence-singularity-stephen-hawking-elon-musk/