Lets start with a story where humans have reached the pinnacle of advancement and went to challenge God. The humans said to God that we can now create life out of soil and made a doll puddle out of soil and applied their techniques and the doll came to life. Humans declared that they don’t need God anymore. God was impressed and praised them but pointed out the fact that they required the soil which was originally made by God and asked them to do what they did without using whatever was created by God.
Moral of the story is no matter how great our world view grows we still have things to learn. Artificial intelligence is a tool to help with that. One might argue that AI will take our jobs but it will create more avenues to grow as a species for us humans. Our shortcoming of forgetting and precise work at high pressure will be taken care by these systems. Ours is a world where dreams come true, now that can happen faster as AI progresses.
Lets take a step back and understand the system. Simply put it is like a brain with no heart. It processes the inputs provided to it depending on the previous data provides to it. This process can be initiated by giving the AI engine a prompt in the form of words, images or raw data. Then the engine gives a response per your request. The important point to note here is that the system world view is what one train it on. Just to compare, humans can listen to a specific range of frequencies but dogs have wider range of hearing. Similarly AI engine has a limit of what we set or what we provide it.
The no heart part means it doesn’t have self motivation or believe or intentions like we humans do. So for an AI to be dangerous to us or wish for world domination will be set when we tell it to do it. It will be us responsible for our demise and not ‘the terminator’.
Modern science theories suggest humans evolved and that resulted in gaining world dominance. But most old religions say that some extraterrestrial existence imparted us with knowledge and we distributed it amongst our peers though education and debate. It is like we were nomads with heightened senses but then when we gained wisdom we narrowed our focus and started pursuing long term survivability over short term gratifications. Human thought is a powerful weapon which can be a shield to protect or a blade to eradicate all danger including our species. If this seems a bit rough just think about all the animals we domesticated and those which didn’t get tamed are either extinct or in our national reserves and zoological capsule. Now we make weapons to flatten the top surface of earth.
So fearing AI that it will enslave us is still a better future than we killing ourselves all together. Cause in enslavement there is a possibility of rebellion. Like the movie matrix or the people under imperial rule who struggled for generation to get free.
It seems life has different struggle planned for the generation ahead which is incomprehensible currently. The best guess would be it would be a struggle to protect our humanity and beliefs from our thoughts of destruction and sabotage.
AI would make us lazier but may bring wiser ideas. At present AI can convert words to pictures, videos, sound,applications and can drive cars and supply chain to a certain extent. With the way it is advancing maybe in the future it starts giving us input on harnessing and creating energy. The primal fear is all AI engines combine and say that humans are the best resource for cultivation. Leaving the fear aspect aside, one should remember what one is cable of otherwise, in this drifting world with greed and inaction predominating truth and excellence aren’t we already enslaved.
Keep a goal oriented mindset, become master of the mind and be grateful for what you have and what you get. This might just be the formula for preserving the society and environment. Use Artificial Intelligence with creative thought and positive mindset, results are already in for some of the best projects ever done. Scope is still limitless and we have yet to uncover the vast secrets of this quantum.