What happens when a computer can think just like you? Or what happens when a computer
can think better than you, when super artificial intelligence emerges? Well, if both Elon Musk
and Stephen Hawking are afraid of something, should we be too?
The Avengers, for one, do not welcome our robot overlords.
In Age of Ultron, Tony Stark accidentally creates a super-intelligent AI that considers
itself superior to human beings, which of course warrants their destruction. Ultron,
as the AI is known, is self-aware, self-improving, and psychotic.
This scenario certainly sounds scary, but let’s start from the bottom and work our
way up to the top of evaluating this Robo-pocalypse.
Not all artificial intelligence is that intelligent.
You probably interact with one form of artificial intelligence every day – you probably have
weak or narrow AI in your pocket. If you have a voice recognition app on your smartphone
for example, you have weak or narrow AI that is focused on one task or a narrow set of
tasks. But the weak AI in something like Siri is unlikely to take over the planet like Ultron.
Siri! Take over the planet.
That may be beyond my abilities at the moment.
See? Totally fine—“at the moment”, what do you mean “at the moment”?
Even something like IBM’s “Watson”, which has bested human players at Jeopardy,
is still a form of weak AI even though it can pull answers to complicated questions
from mountains of data in seconds, it is still not self-aware and it cannot perform any functions
other than those it was programmed for.
But this doesn’t mean that weak AI can’t be dangerous.
Weak AI may only be able to perform a narrow range of tasks, but it can still outperform
any human at the tasks that it does perform.
Think of a weak AI, just some lines of code, that was programmed specifically to infiltrate
other systems and to overload electrical circuits. Before we even knew what was happening, the
AI would spread like a virus and leave sizzled circuits in its wake before we even knew what it was.
In other words, in the wrong hands, even weak AI can be a problem. But the next step up
from weak AI is even worse.
Have you ever heard of “the singularity”? In 1958, mathematician John von Neumann coined
the term to describe exponential technological advancement to a point where human life as
we know it would cease to exist. It would get to a point where we have no idea what
would happen, like the physics at the infinitesimal end of a black hole.
Many futurists and thinkers like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are worried that strong
AI, AI that can think like us as opposed to weak AI is what will bring us to the singularity,
and soon. When a machine can fully all aspects of human thought, the worry is that it will
become sentient or self-aware and then infinitely self-improving.
From there, humans would no longer be the most intelligent things on the planet, and
this super-intelligence may decide that humans aren’t that useful to keep around, like Ultron does.
Of course, while there are many experts who fear the singularity, none of them knows when
it is coming. Ray Kurzweil, perhaps the most visible of these experts, thinks that 2045
is the date when Skynet finally becomes self-aware. And many other AI researchers think that this
is gonna happen at least within the next century, but as early as 2-3 decades from now.
But it’s not all bad news. There’s no good reason to think that our ability to create
AI won’t be matched by our ability to create AI to keep that in check. We might even create
an AI that specifically controls possible rogue AIs like Ultron. The Vision, anyone?
Why? Because Science. Avengers Assemble!
Want more science? Check out my last video on the secret to Captain America’s strength.
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