I believe there’s a whole lot of confusion over artificial intelligence and its purported threat to humanity.
It’s a tool, folks, and yet we continue to ascribe human responses to an invention that is not anywhere near human.
“It will turn on us once it achieves sentience.”
Sorry to disappoint, folks, but AI is a machine. Ever since Hal in the Space Odyssey series, over-excited viewers have assigned human attributes to computers. Once the current frenzy pauperizes investors, and settles on one or two winners, that speculation will no doubt calm down.
AI is powerful because, for the first time, computers are learning directly from computers and, before long, they will have captured and documented pretty much all that is known in today’s world, updating itself tomorrow and the next day into an endless cycle.
It’s quite likely that either Greg Brockman and/or Elon Musk will own those piles of facts, and sell them to us on their way to $gazillionaireship. Why pause at mere $trillions?
Nothing new there, the super wealthy have been treating us like third-rate citizens ever since they sold us to China.
My bet, if I had any money to bet, would trend toward Brockman, because I think Musk has pretty much run his race and shown himself to be a poor manager of spectacular innovations.
Who really knows how all that will shake out, but trillions of dollars are in the game at the moment. Most of those trillions will be lost by investors who find themselves left by the side of the road. Another bubble set to blow up in humanity’s face.
What I think, for sure, is that worrying about AI turning on its human ownership is like expecting a hundred thousand Encyclopedia Britannicas to produce a logical opinion on human behavior.
AI does not in any way mirror the human animal that created it.
It does not fancy the acquisition of wealth, needs no food nor air to breathe, and is not interested in yachts or winter holidays in warm climates. So far as I know, it harbors no political ambitions.
Those who bask in the sun of its creation will do what all greedy inventors do…rob us blind for its use and (probably, successfully) lower the common man yet one more embarrassing rung down the ladder toward poverty.
Yes, jobs will be lost.
But the knowledge base of the common man will rise enormously, and self education will be available at $20 or $30 or $50 each and every month. One can expect Harvard and Yale and MIT to all but disappear, like riders into a western sunset.
We cannot know the ultimate ramifications of artificial intelligence, any more than we understood what prior technological progress had in store, as we moved from agricultural to industrial to consumer and information eras.
But all of them scared us half to death. 125 years ago, 94% of Americans worked in agriculture. Today, 4% handle a much larger source of food (with a little help from a Mexican here and there). Henry Ford’s River Rouge assembly line took coal and iron ore in at the top, and delivered finished automobiles at the other end. In the process he doubled wages to $5 a day.
If one were to look for hope in a future that in many ways looks pretty bleak, AI may allow us to overcome technologically a headlong rush into environmental disaster.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
Then Elon might see no need to ship humanity off to the worst possible choice…Mars.
But stop worrying about artificial intelligence. Hal was a fictional device.
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