🤖 Artificial Intelligence: Humanity's Final Invention?

Twelve thousand years is like the blink of an eye to the universe, but our planet has witnessed the agricultural, industrial, scientific, and digital revolutions. Perhaps this century will mark the start of another technological revolution or, less appealing, the extinction of the human race.

In the 90s, the internet was termed as "the world's future." Nowadays, artificial intelligence is considered by most as humanity's final invention. Well, science-fiction writers have had their shares of the pie and it is time to take AI seriously. This should be the greatest conversation of our time because humankind's survival is at stakes, and of course, I want to take part. The topic seems thrilling to many and—justifiably—frightful to others (the perfect combination to catch my attention).

Artificial intelligence is any machine programmed to think like humans or mimic human thinking. It is not uncommon to hear about self-driving cars, face-recognition programs, or recommendation algorithms. Narrow (program specific) AI is the backbone of most of these technologies.

The positive impacts of AI in our lives will be amazing: near-perfect search engines, tremendous scientific advancements including space exploration and genome editing, upgrading of medical and educational services, just to name a few. It is worth rethinking about the definition of AI to understand how probably limitless are its uses. Newton, Einstein, and Richard Feynman are admired due to the intellect they demonstrated. Imagine the prowess AI might be able to achieve.

Humans are capable to improve and achieve great feats, so will be artificial general intelligence (human-level AI). We are not yet at that stage nor are we a hundred percent sure we will reach there, but as time goes, we are getting closer to it.

History has proven that intelligence is the greatest asset of our species: we are living in houses with air-conditioners while other apes are in the wild or in cages. What is problematic with powerful tools is how destructive they can be. We wiped out almost all the mega-fauna in the lands we invaded, destroyed vast amounts of vegetation, and produced non-negligible amounts of greenhouse gases. We are now living under the threat of a climate disaster—with possibly lethal consequences.

As many parents can observe, a child does not always do what we want him or her to do. The child makes mistakes, which are most of the time corrected, and grows into an adult. Hence we can conjecture that any form intelligence is hardly controlled or predictable, but by the same token, there are hopes that errors will be corrected.

That unpredictability should ultimately be taken into consideration before creating a human-level AI which might eventually develop into superintelligence. It would be a sad outcome if its goals do not align with ours; it might not necessarily hate or love us but might use any available resource to achieve its goals, and humans are also made up of atoms which nano-assemblers would be able to convert into "useful" resources.

Yes, nano and genetic engineering should not be taken out of the picture. Their combination with an "evil" AI would definitely be horrible. Hence, it appears that AGI's creation is a one shot affair, thus should be undertaken with scrupulous care.

The benefits and challenges presented by this new form of technology are innumerable and remarkable. We are driven to create new things or organisms. It is a little wonder that I find artificial intelligence so captivating. Every form of novelty comes with its set of problems, so we will try to prevent and/or solve them.

We are responsible to create the future we want. The future is not someone else's problem; it is your problem too.

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