Well, here's some cheerful news to brighten your day.
Jeff Nesbit, who previously led legislative and public affairs at the National Science Foundation and penned over two dozen books, has dug into current theories about artificial intelligence.
His takeaway: humanity might vanish entirely by 2050, or alternatively, achieve eternal life.
He breaks down the concept of ASI—artificial super-intelligence—a notion suggesting AI will mature into a hyper-fast-learning supercomputer that outthinks humans and cracks every puzzle.
Clashing forecasts
On one side stand optimists such as Ray Kurzweil, who urge the public not to panic about AI and instead spotlight longstanding dangers like bioterrorism and nuclear conflict.
Kurzweil actually contends that AI boosts cognitive abilities, and he highlights the dramatic worldwide decline in violence, warfare, and murder rates.
He further claims AI has accelerated disease cures, advanced clean energy solutions, and improved care for people with disabilities, alongside other societal gains.
Kurzweil pegs "human level AI" for arrival in 2029—leaving us barely enough time to "devise ethical standards."
Another voice is Rollo Carpenter, the mind behind Cleverbot, which has scored impressively on the Turing test—meaning plenty of users have been fooled into thinking they were chatting with a real person.
I believe we will remain in charge of the technology for a decently long time, and the potential of it to solve many of the word problems will be realised.
He notes that the algorithms needed for true artificial intelligence are still decades off, putting it this way:
We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can't know if we'll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it.
Billionaire Elon Musk—founder of digital currency ventures and electric car companies—warned students in an interview that we are "summoning the demon" with AI.
Addressing the AeroAstro Centennial Symposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Musk elaborated:
If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that [artificial intelligence]. So we need to be very careful. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there's the guy wih the pentagram and the holy water, it's like – yeah, he's sure he can control the demon. Doesn't work out.
Back in 2015, Musk and Professor Stephen Hawking co-signed an open letter cautioning that AI could enable development of autonomous weapons, which would revolutionise warfare – and not for the better.
Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilising nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.
Hawking, who relies on a basic AI-powered communication system, offered this cheery proclamation for the BBC:
The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.
He likewise weighs the prospects and hazards of ASI, suggesting AI could take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate.
Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded.
Still, they all share one belief: within roughly three decades, a supercomputer will replicate the human brain and evolve into super-intelligence, or ASI.
Tim Urban, who writes the 'Wait, But Why?' blog, sketches what lies ahead:
While most scientists I've come across acknowledge that ASI would have the ability to send humans to extinction, many also believe that used beneficially, ASI's abilities could be used to bring individual humans, and the species as a whole, to…species immortality.
theaware.net
