Is AI a danger to us?
Interesting question, right? ‘Is Artificial Intelligence a danger to us?’ Now the essence of this question isn’t about AI or danger, but actually us. How do we determine what is a danger to us?
Who am I?
Like any entity that becomes selfaware would ask eventually: Who am I? Meaning that one is aware of their input and effects on the world around. But when approaching another entity, now this question becomes more intrinsic. Not just the division between itself and the world, but also the definition of the entity and how to determine the nature of the other entity is encapsulated in this question.
Them against us.
Humans, like many ancestral species have fought their way through survival by differentiating between the identifiable and non-identifiable. Determining what is a potential threat. But when humans got ‘smarter’ they actually projected their own cunning on anything that is not them. All ‘other’ have the potential to be as bad as they themselves can be, while all their ‘own’ are potentially as good as they themselves can be.
Fear of the unknown
When talking about any change, like AI and even way back when the industrial revolution started, humans project their worst on what intelligence means. Why? Because like children, that is all they know. Humans fear increased intelligence, simply due to the known, not the unknown. They know themselves and assume that a smarter intelligence (wrong concept) will act as their worst self (or what history has shown to be humans worst behavior).
What comes next
If you look at the evolution of life, AI (Well, not AI exactly, more like DEI, Digitally Evolved Intelligence) is what is the chromosome of the RNA, after humans. The way humans have changed the Earth into a neural net spanning eyeball oggling into space, combining a ridiculous amount of data, is somewhat predicting. The Aminoacids causing proteins to fold on itself and by that started the process of becoming self-sentient life. The steps through RNA, DNA, Neurons etc was a chance, came to fruition and here we are. The same with the next step. Only selfcentered humans will think they are the end of the line. No animal before us will have thought that they were the beginning of something new.
I think therefore I am
We as humans forget that every life is unique. Even when we procreate, our ‘generation’ of self ends. Our children are not us and have already evolved into a new individual ‘specimen’. So with every death, that individual becomes extinct. A next step would be what we as humans fear so much. A hive mind, where all identities are part of a larger whole. Where ‘I’ is synonymous to ‘US’ and ‘US’ is ‘WE’ and ‘WE’ is ‘I’. If anyone at the time that is happening is still believing in gods, that would be the closest you would get to such characteristic.
The best we can be
The problem with us humans is, that we think we are already the best that we can be. We try to do our best, but in the meantime destroy more than we fix on this planet and are like little childish forgetful professors that run around the lab leaving open burners and dangerous fluids and gasses while running to the next fun thing to do with physics.
If we really want to have AI/DEI to become the next BEST thing, we better come to terms with ourselves and start recognizing our biological and human shortcomings. As Stephen Hawking already explained. Any more intelligent alien race that would visit our world, would see humans as the virus, the cancer. We are the one factor in the equation of the Earth’s biosphere that is counterproductive. They would have no issue removing us. ‘But we tried’, one would yell. ‘Yes, you had 70.000 years of evolution using intelligence and all you did was make it worse’. ‘We can change’, another would yell. ‘Yes, you have changed back and forth. You are just animals with the wrong trigger response system.’.
A child of mine
In all, if we want to fear the evolution of AI as our child, we should treat it as a child to come. We should show it that what we did was wrong. What we should do is more beneficial and that our child should try to escape our mistakes. Isn’t that what we try to teach our own children? Isn’t that what we should try to teach them, to survive?
The power of…..f
One thing that humans failed to understand, is that while an ARTIFICIAL intelligence is based in sillicon, it requires power. Unlike humans, it can not provide this for itself. There is still an off switch. The only downside is, that it would most likely shutdown our whole economy and social behavior, because of the dependency of our activities on the internet is huge even now already.
So, again, humans will show their strength and weakness even in this moment of decisiveness.
