Artificial Intelligence and the End of Humanity E-Book

Claude Kramer

• Herausgeber: BookThug
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 31

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

At the inauguration of the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence at Harvard University, physicist Stephen Hawking summarized his concerns in the following sentence: "The rise of powerful AI will be either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity. We do not yet know which". This could be an interesting way to approach artificial intelligence: navigating a path between enthusiasm and caution, between wonder and terror.

Leseprobe

Rapid Technological Advances

This is an essay about how artificial intelligence will spell the end of humanity. Perhaps not the total extinction of the human race, but rather “humanity” as we know it, with all its distinctive, exclusive and unique characteristics.

We often speak of “technological advances”, meaning that we usually welcome these developments as a sort of step forward on a “desirable” path. But do these “advances” really improve our quality of life, or somehow improve the planet in general? Do they happen to cause greater happiness or greater equality? How do these “advancements” contribute to interpersonal relationships, empathy, and mental health in general? How are they being regulated and controlled, who takes care of us humans, of our privacy and our integrity?

These questions, of course, can´t be answered easily nor definitely. In this context, the explosion of artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots and programs that write, compose, design and draw (all with increasingly better styles and at unmatched speed) promises to revolutionize our lives and upset the foundations of areas such as medicine, education and the arts.

We have been living with computers in our homes for several decades now. The transition from the encyclopedia to the search engine is already incorporated into our daily lives, even for those of us who grew up with those thick volumes as a source of reference in our homes. Smartphones are “basic” for our daily living: simply something we cannot spare. We use them to show us the way somewhere, to wire money, to book and buy a flight, to find out what someone wore at a certain event, whatever it may be... It should not surprise us that we already spend an average of a quarter of the day scrolling down through those continuous and endless stories and advertisements that social media offer us...

Some time ago, voice commands were the technological “advance” that we incorporated into our lives. Virtual assistants that were ready at all times to open applications while we drove our cars, to read us the most popular recipe for beef stew, in short, to keep our hands clean of activities such as finding a contact from a list or writing down the address we are heading to.

For now, these devices are outside of our bodies. But developments like Neuralink (by Elon Musk) are working on the direct integration of these devices into our bodies. That is one of the issues that lies ahead. On the other hand, AI are trained to learn on their own, and in some way to become independent of their programmers. That is, these intelligences could detach themselves from their creators and take paths they themselves determine... That seems pretty scaring.

While many of these “advances” that still send chills down our spines are not yet available, everything could be changing at such an accelerated pace that in the blink of an eye, all these “advances” could lead us to the edge of a precipice, and perhaps they end up pushing us into freefall. But let us not get ahead of ourselves in deliberate pessimism, let us first take a look at the brief history (of less than a hundred years) of artificial intelligence and the key moments in its development, which will allow us to better understand the future that lies ahead, the possibilities, and also the inherent dangers.

•

Hawking warned us