What are the things that can destroy humans?
It is Human-Mimicking AI Technology, Human Aggression and Resources Overconsumption.
Introduction
It is humans themselves, as if we have a “self-destruction gene” or “war gene”. Some estimate that about 117 billion members of our species have ever been born on Earth since 190,000 B.C.E.
All our human history, people have been engaged in all sorts of destructive opposition, wars and conflicts, with themselves and Nature and its environment.
Humans just 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals. Of all the mammals on Earth, 96% are livestock and humans, only 4% are wild mammals. The destruction of wild habitat for farming, logging and development has resulted in the start of what many scientists consider the sixth mass extinction of life to occur in the Earth’s four billion year history. About half the Earth’s animals are thought to have been lost in the last 50 years.
It is mostly caused by unsustainable consumption of non-renewable resources. Specifically, it may refer to:
water overconsumption; energy overconsumption; electric energy overconsumption; natural gas consumption/gas depletion; oil overconsumption/oil depletion; logging/deforestation; fishing/overfishing; land use/land loss; resource depletion and general exploitation, and environmental degradation.
Industrialization and globalized markets and growing human population have increased the tendency for overconsumption of resources, leading to resource depletion, climate change and a shrinking of the earth's carrying capacity.
Again, has the world ever been at peace? Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history. How many people have died in war? At least 108 million people were killed in wars in the twentieth century. Estimates for the total number killed in wars throughout all of human history range from 150 million to 1 billion.
And the combined armed forces of the world have 21.3 million people. China has the world's largest, with 2.4 million. America is second with 1.4 million. India has 1.3 million, North Korea 1 million, and Russia 900,000. Of the world's 20 largest militaries, 14 are in developing nations?
A Human-Like AI as a killer application of Humanity
Now, a killer application of humans is human-like technology, AI, Robotics, Automation, added up with the emerging converging technologies, as nano-, bio-, neuro-, info- and quantum technologies.
Today’s human-mimicking AI is a leading cause, as far as it is after human-like intelligence. It is thus designed, developed and deployed as [quantum] “computer systems that perform tasks or make decisions that usually require human intelligence. AI can perform these tasks or make these decisions without explicit human instructions”. That’s it.
“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race….It would 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.”— Stephen Hawking told the BBC
“I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines.” —Claude Shannon
“Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing.” —Larry Page
“I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. I mean with artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon.” —Elon Musk warned at MIT’s AeroAstro Centennial Symposium
Relying on the acausal statistical and machine learning, such an AI is to mimic human behavior, mind, or intelligence, as in voice recognition, language processing, computer vision or neural networks.
The dangers vs. benefits of the Statistic Anthropomorphic and Anthropocentric AI (AAAI) are so enormous, that they are clear even for graduate students [read the AL article, Should I Be Scared of Artificial Intelligence?]
The Dangers vs. Benefits
AAAI benefits. The statistic AI is an attractive machine intelligence due to its ability and capacity to automatically detect, identify, process and remember increasing number of relevant variables and associations from an environment.
1) It is possible to automate everything you need to run your business 2) You do not trust humans because humans are prone to emotion, fatigue and sickness 3) It is cost effective 4) Highly productive
AI can analyze massive data which is impossible by humans and “machines can be immensely more effective in this task [than humans] due to their fast response, multi-dimensional data structures, parallel processing, huge data storage and lack of fatigue”.
AI use in medical industry is in automated diagnostics, clinical decision making, auto-mated surgery and prognostication.
AI can be also used in power grids and electrical industries to predict various power related issues such as power outage depending on past hurricane data, fault detection and wind power forecast for power generation depending on wind speed, among other things.
AI can be used in waste industry to predict models and techniques of the most efficient waste reduction. AI robots can replace waste disposal construction workers who often in many countries work in hazardous conditions with low pay and low perks
Dangers. It will create global technological inequality enhancing the already powerful nations more powerful and making the less developed nations more exploitable. Also, the military industrial complex will become even more bold and audacious because AI warfare will save national lives so there will be no more public discontent against declaration of wars.
Tyrannical nations will become more oppressive. Imagine the dominion of Skynet except being controlled by the elites.
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This militarization of AI poses a great threat against humanity. Militarizing AI objectives by training machines to do harm and/or preserve a certain political and strategic policy seems like a sci-fi movie becoming reality.
Faulty, inadequately trained, poorly understood algorithms, data poisoning and incorrect statistical approximation can produce erroneous results, which may have wide-scale impact on people’s lives.
Take the example of Tesla self-driving cars which have failed and caused fatalities. For example, an AI system was fooled into deciding that “stop sign” had a “speed limit of 45”. This could be disastrous for self-driving cars.
Also, such faults may have a national and/or global impact if the military industrial complex automates a distributed armed surveillance system.
Depending on the design of such a system, which may self-learn, identify and execute its own objectives and depending on the severity and scope of arming may determine the danger level to human society.
The danger of AI rises also from increasing development of quantum computing, mass and distributed application of digital components and extensive digitization process made possible by affordable and cost-effective technologies partly due to cheap labor in some of the cruelest nations and regions on earth. These increase the use and hence the probability of AI harms.
Lastly, AI may bring about a revolution in perfecting human apathy. We are today already socially and emotionally isolated by being glued to digital devices, sometimes totally unaware of human diaspora around the world. With the advent of emotionally acting robots, human beings will become more distant and this will increase human apathy across societies and regions causing a demise and slow down in human centric policies.
On the top, the AAAI has critical response to small changes: It may behave completely randomly even if there is a very slight variation is mathematical and statistical approximation. For example, image or speech recognition AI systems can be fooled by small alteration in the images or speeches.
BUT it is naively believed that the fear of a super intelligent machine can be rejected by the following propositions to be overruled by quantum computing:
1. AAAI works on limited models and thus cannot mimic general human cognition and intelligence.
2. AAAI abilities and capabilities are as much as the developer sets it to be. Computationally and algorithmically there are limitations to software design and development.
The Real-World AI Transdisciplinary Solutions
The only real solution is the Trans-AI model created by EIS Encyclopedic Intelligent Systems as a Real-World Machine Intelligence complementing human behaviour, mind, and intelligence.
All the Trans-AI machines have a matter/energy/data input, a matter/energy/knowledge output, and a transforming or modifying and transmitting causal feedback control mechanisms. While all the AAAI machines, mimicking the black box brain, have a data input, a data output, and a transforming or modifying and transmitting learning functions or backprop algorithms.
All traditional technologies and machines, from simple machines to prime movers, generators, motors and operators or information systems, augment or replace human or animal effort for the accomplishment of physical not mental tasks, to transform, modify and transmit forces and motions or energy.
The operations of physical technologies involve the transformation of mechanical, thermal, nuclear, electrical, magnetic, or chemical energy into mechanical, and vice versa. That’s it.
Conclusion
Musk wisely predicted that AI would outsmart humanity and overtake human civilization in less than five years and that AI and robots will take over everyone’s jobs and will do everything better than us.
According to him, Narrow and Weak and Human-like AI is the real existential risk to humankind and people not really appreciate that.
The simulation of human intellect in digital computers and controlled robotic machines that learn from experiences and are encoded to think like humans to solve multifaceted problems in an array of different frameworks and environments is the way to human extinction.