🔰Artificial SuperIntelligence: What It Means For Human Race? #Part 2🔰
In my previous post, I discussed the advent of Advanced Artificial Intelligence and the rise of Sentient Machines and what it means for the human race.
Bots like TayTweets have shown how Artificial Intelligence can adapt to and learn from human interaction. As Microsoft found out the hard way when Tay began to mimic some pretty nasty conversations. Then there are groups like DeepMind now owned by Google who developed AlphaGo the AI that defeated the best 'Go' player in the world.
The revolutionary thing about the AlphaGo AI is that the ancient Chinese game we call Go is much more complicated than something like chess. Deep Blue the IBM computer that defeated chess master Garry Kasparov in 1997 was groundbreaking at that time because until that point no machine had ever bested a human at chess.
However, Deep Blue isn't all that impressive due to the limited number of possible moves in chess it was able to make its way through the calculations to pick the best moves. Go on the other hand has a staggering number of possible moves as many as there are atoms in the entire universe. Because of this huge number of possibilities, AlphaGo had to take a different approach in contrast to Deep Blue or Watson.
AlphaGo is classified as general AI meaning it's not restricted to performing a specific set of tasks. Simply put if you provide a general-purpose AI with a task it's never encountered before and allow it to run overnight for example when you check on it the next morning it will have mastered the task. Of course, the time required varies with the complexity of the task.
The potential next step for AI is what many people are afraid of including high-profile scientists and innovators like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk. The looming possibility that holds such appeal in science fiction is the potential development of what's called Advanced General Intelligence or AGI. The distinguishing factor with AGI is that it's not only able to perform routine calculations and learn by trial and error but also exhibit the use of biological cognitive functions such as planning, using common sense and making complicated decisions under uncertainty.
While there are a few high profile people advocating caution others such as Kurzweil maintain that there is really nothing to fear. He predicts that while yes we will reach a point at which machines outpace humans in intelligence what we should expect to see first is a sort of synthesis of man and machine. He is not necessarily talking about Cyborgs but rather advancements in medicine and nanotechnology that will dramatically extend and improve human life.
Elon Musk is currently working closely with a non-profit called OpenAI which has the goal of merging humanity with machines. Musk suspects that such measures will protect humanity from becoming irrelevant in the face of super-intelligent computers.
So, before we can expect our robot uprising we can hopefully look forward to disease-fighting nanobots and a direct link to all human knowledge right from our own brains. Not exactly Cyborgs more like Humanity 2.0. While there will be no doubt strong opposition to putting any kind of technology in our heads many people eagerly await the day when they can upgrade and be on the cutting edge of this unparalleled new era of technology. Once we have reached that point then we can start worrying about the potential legal, ethical and societal ramifications of humanoid robots.
I hope you guys found this post interesting and informative. Please share your thoughts in the comments section below and if you enjoy reading my posts show your support by upvoting it.
References and Further Reads: 1, 2 & 3