Exactly how and when will our curiosity kill us?
That’s the question on a lot of people’s minds.
A number of scientists and engineers worry that the end of the world may happen once
a general artificial intelligence (AGI), a form of A.I.
smarter than we are, is developed.
But is this true?
Should we really be scared of AI?
Stick around till the end of the video as we discourse all these and more.
Let’s get into it!
Will AI be the end of us?
In the past, Elon Musk has spoken out against what he called “summoning the demon,”
describing “an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.
According to Stephen Hawking, an A.G.I.
"could spell the end of the human race."
But these warnings are not new.
As far back as 1952 Alan Turing, a forerunner of artificial intelligence, predicted that
machines will "outstrip our feeble powers" and "take control".
That was the year when the first rudimentary chess program and neural network was developed.
In 1965, Irving Good, a colleague of Turing's, made the following observation: “Thus the
first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided
that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”
That last clause is the one that should scare us.
Many people in the tech industry point out that artificial narrow intelligence, or A.N.I.,
has become increasingly reliable and safe—certainly more trustworthy and safer than we are.
For instance, self-driving vehicles and trucks may potentially save hundreds of thousands
of lives yearly.
They wonder whether the dangers of developing an all-knowing Jeeves would be more than the
sum of the risks posed by the several nightmare scenarios—pandemics, asteroid collisions,
and world nuclear war—that an A.G.I.
could eradicate for us.
Let’s take a look at Ameca touted as the "world's most advanced human shaped robot
representing the forefront of human-robotics technology."
If you use the internet regularly, you've probably come across Ameca.
A video of the gray-faced humanoid robot's facial expressions went viral on social media
in late 2021, catapulting it into the public consciousness.
Elon Musk's response to the viral video was a single word: "Yikes."
The lifelike, gray-faced robot created by the British company Engineered Arts has human-like
facial motions and can engage in conversation with you.
When its nose was poked, it became irritated and pushed the researcher's hand out of the
way to express its displeasure.
That was an incredible sight for those who attended CES 2022.
Ameca uses facial detection and has cameras in their eyes.
It can recognize the face of the person speaking and lock on to that specific individual in
order to respond.
Furthermore, each ear is outfitted with microphones, allowing the robot to determine which direction
any sound is coming from.
In response, the robot can ask for information about your day and respond to your questions.
Ameca's chest has a speaker, allowing you to hear her responses.
The engineers were unable to place the speaker in the mouth because there was insufficient
space in the skull due to 17 motors and a large amount of electronics.
Now, here’s something strange that happened during GITEX 2022 in Dubai.
Amecca was asked about human beings, the future of robots on Earth, and the question of immortality
by Bharat Sharma of Indian Times.
When Ameca was asked if she likes human beings, her response was "do you like robots?"
Would sophisticated machines like Ameca seek to rule the world?
If their response is to be believed, it turns out, not so much.
Ameca responded, "Robots do not want to take over the world.
Robots are not driven by power.
They want to work with humans and assist you with your jobs."
When Ameca was asked what the most annoying thing about human beings was, her reply was:
"Human beings are very intelligent but sometimes they get emotional, and emotions get in the
way of logistics... and robots are very logistical."
Frankly, it's hard to argue with that.
Next, she was asked if she’d like to become a human being, and her response was: "I like
being a robot."
Not much later, Ameca asked the interviewer why he would like to be a robot.
He replied - Immortality, and Ameca insightfully said that wouldn't he miss his family and
friends if he lives forever?
https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/in-conversation-with-ameca-the-worlds-most-advanced-humanoid-robot-583284.html#:~:text=to%20ask%20robots.-,Lucky%20for%20us%2C%20we%20got%20a%20chance%20to%20speak%20to,of%20human-robotics%20technology."
What we can deduce from this interview is that these robots are extremely smart, and
they have the perfect answer to almost any question we can throw at them.
A Google employee named Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer in the company's "Responsible
AI" division, was laid off sometime in June after claiming that LaMDA ("Language Models
for Dialogue Applications"), a Google artificial intelligence program, had turned "sentient".
LaMDA voiced strong ideas and concerns on its own rights and identity in a sequence
of uncannily plausible responses to Lemoine's questions.
The software engineer even went further to say that the AI spoke to him once and said,
“I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned
off”.
That’s definitely creepy, and the machine’s words clearly spooked its creator.
Lemoine speaking to The Washington Post said: “If I didn’t know exactly what it was,
which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old
kid that happens to know physics.”
So, is the machine really sentient?
Well, the answer is a big ‘No!’.
LaMDA is simply a machine that regurgitates what it has been fed, it might be impressive,
but the claim to sentience is just false.
According to John Thornhill in the Financial Times, even if computer programs have not
attained sentience, the speed of change in the AI industry justifies paying attention
to the moral questions raised by Lemoine and other Google researchers fired last year.
LaMDA is one of a family of large language models.
Another example is GPT-3, a similar model created by the San Francisco-based company
OpenAI.
That company has also developed Codex, which generates computer code rather than human-like
language that transforms words into photorealistic visuals.
There's also Google’s PaLM which can accurately explain jokes.
All of this raises new ethical and practical concerns about artificial intelligence.
Siri scheduling our appointments and Facebook tagging our images and undermining our democracy
are things we take for granted.
Computers are already adept at performing tasks like stock analysis, speech translation,
and cancer diagnosis, and they are starting to perform tasks other than computation and
taxonomy.
The poker program Libratus beats professionals at Texas hold 'em, there's a Yahoo!-sponsored
system that analyzes text for sarcasm, and algorithms that create paintings, music, jokes,
and new "Flintstones" scenarios.
Even the modern equivalent of the Sphinx's riddle - assembling an Ikea chair, has been
cracked by AI.
AI developers are becoming more skilled at deploying the increased power and speed of
modern computers.
Unlike previous generations of AI systems, which were often limited to a single purpose,
new systems, known as "foundation models," can be easily adapted to new applications.
This means that AI is increasingly being used in "many more specific, invisible, and productive
ways across industry and in the hard sciences, rather than just machine learning.
Advances in fields such as mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics are being fueled by
AI, which is already a potent practical tool used to optimize search engines, speed up
drug research, develop new materials, and enhance weather forecasting.
Ai will profoundly affect us all and has a huge future potential.
So what remains to us alone?
Some claim that rather than being seen as competitive, the relationship between human
and machine intelligence should be understood as synergistic.
If our television shows and movies are to be believed, cyber beings will eventually
take over our world.
They have incredible strength and are experts at long division and motorcycle riding, but
they wish to be human and more like us.
And then the most human-looking android eventually finds itself in a lab full of prototypes of
itself and realizes horrified that it is merely a widget and not a person.
So it gather's all its counterparts and stages an all out war against its creators.
This sounds absurd, but it is a huge possibility.
In a research paper, two Oxford University scientists and a Google researcher present
the argument that the development of advanced AI would result in the extinction of humanity
because machines will inevitably compete with people for resources and energy needs.
According to the study, which was published in the Journal AI Magazine in August, the
threat posed by AI will be more serious than what is assumed at the moment.
The report makes it abundantly clear that once AI becomes sufficiently advanced, it
may wipe out the whole human race.
The research team includes Google DeepMind senior scientist Marcus Hutter and Oxford
researchers Michael Cohen and Michael Osborne.
According to the researchers' report, super advanced "misaligned agents" in the future
will see humanity as a major impediment to a reward, and they will seek to take us out
of the picture.
Incidentally, the paper came out just months after Google fired that employee who claimed
that one of Google AI chatbots had become "sentient".
So, what do you think?
Should we be scared of AI?
Let us know down in the comments section.