Artificial Intelligence, Friend or Enemy?
I will first start by stating that I do not come from this new emerging industry of AI, I have simply been watching a lot of YouTube videos and reading a lot of web pages on the subject, I class myself as an enthusiast. So here I am throwing out my ideas, at this stage I am very much for the development of AI as I think that its capability is going to completely turn our world upside down. But with a technology as revolutionary as AI I think that it really must be developed with caution and responsibility. The idea of an AI turning against its human creators in the future would have been completely laughable 10 years ago, but only now is this subject of an enemy AI slowly being taken seriously. Please feel free to comment below on what you think.
A lot of the webpages that I read on this subject talk about AI as being the last invention that humanity will ever make and to an extent I agree with this statement, how are we ever going to compete with an AI that is a billion times more intelligent than the smartest human on Earth?
From what I understand the human brain can process data at insanely fast speeds. For example, your two eyes are continuously taking in data in the form of light and that data is then being processed by your brain. There is never any lagging in the time that it takes to process the data, there is never any slowdown in the frame rate it just happens instantaneously. Same goes for your other senses such as hearing, touch, taste and smell. Our whole body is continuously taking in information about its surroundings and environment which is then being processed by our brains which seeks to make sense of all of this data making us all self-aware, I don’t know the exact figure but in a single day we must take in close to 100GB of data from our surrounding environment. When we touch a hot object, our brain concludes that this object is hot and immediately triggers pain receptors telling us to drop the object. The frontal lobe of the human brain is where all the higher thought process occurs such as thinking up a design for a building, human reasoning, human creativity, mathematics, poems, etc.
The problem comes when we want to learn something new. This takes time, lots of time. The websites all state that humans have a very low bandwidth. In other words, if you had enough time in the day and were able to sit down and read an entire encyclopedia the average person would only retain about 20% of what they have just read. They would have to read the whole encyclopedia again maybe about 5 times to retain about 90% of it and even then that is going to be a challenging task. Also, the fact the humans forget information if they are not relearning that same information over again.
When you want to transfer an encyclopedia consisting of 5GB in the form of a PDF to a PC it will take maybe 15 mins to complete the transfer from a USB stick to a PC. You don’t have to sit there and send the encyclopedia 5 times across because the PC can only retain 20% of the data. The PC retains 100% of the data 100% of the time. The PC can’t forget the data, the data is always going to be there loaded onto the PC.
Now it would be irrational in this present day to state that the PC now has an encyclopedia loaded on to it and therefore the PC is now smarter than a human being. Yes, the PC has the encyclopedia, but it does not mean anything to it nor is the PC going to do anything with the encyclopedia, it’s just going to sit there in the hard drive. Same scenario would be if you gave a dog $1 million dollars the dog is hardly going to invest its $1 million dollars in the stock market or do anything with it. A cockroach has more self-awareness than the top of the range PC currently on the market today. And that is where I think that the problem stands, if we are going to develop AI then it’s going to have to really understand what is the data that we are loading on to it, it’s going to have to become self-aware.
This is where the controversial problem starts. When the PC starts to gain just a small amount of self-awareness it is then going to start to learn and understand what the encyclopedia actually means, it’s never going to forget any part of the encyclopedia and it’s going to learn it a million times faster than any human. Imagine now if the PC had full access to the internet and could download terabytes of data every second and understand and retained every part of the data, with in 5 seconds its going to have a degree in chemistry, 30 seconds later a masters degree in engineering, 1 min later a PHD in physics, its level of intelligence is going to explode overnight.
Now we get to that part whether this PC is going to be our friend or enemy. Who knowns whether AI will turn against us or not?? But the best way how I have had it explained to me is like this. You’re driving your car to work on a Monday morning, do you always stop your car get out and have a polite conversation with the ants by the side of the road? No, because the ants are idiots, what could you possibly learn from ants? Also, when humans want to build a new highway, or a shopping Centre do we ask the ants permission if it is ok for us to build on their land? No, we just go ahead regardless if we build right over the ant’s nests. Well if we have an AI which is a billion times more intelligent than that of the smartest human being alive today then I really don’t think that the AI is going to look at humans with compassion it will most likely see us as nothing but ants or pests. If it wants to build a new super galactic highway then it’s just going to do it without any human permission or authorization.
Note that these ideas are at least 50 years into the future but I think that it’s worthwhile talking about this subject now because if an AI gets out of control I think that it’s going to be very difficult to stop it, especially if its software becomes imbedded into every electrical hardware device throughout the world. Here is hopping that it is developed responsibility and that it becomes our friend.
Rob.
