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Artificial Intelligence needs a Purpose |
In this section I'm going to make the following assumptions about the future. I'm going to assume that humanity is going to progress forward and that some catastrophe isn't going to set us back to the dark ages or we go extinct. I'm going to assume that Moore's Law continues and that at some point general artificial intelligence surpasses humans. Which raises the all important question; "What happens when computers become smarter than we are?"
What happens when computers become smarter than humanity?
Many people in the AI world worry about that. As computing power increases exponentially the computers are becoming smarter while humanity is standing still. Thus if this continues there will come a point, estimated by Ray Kirzwiel, that around 2030 the machines will be smarter than we are. What does that mean when that happens? No one know what will happen, and that's the problem. Not knowing what AI will do once it becomes smarter than we are is the wrong answer. And it's never too early to be concerned about it because this isn't something we should figure out too late. Elon Musk, one of the world sharpest minds in the AI community is so concerned that he invested millions in OpenAI to help figure it out.
"I don't know what will happen when computers are smarter than people.", is the wrong answer.
Those who are concerned about what AI will do refer to this as "The Control Problem". If AI is smarter than us, and not just a little bit smarter but a lot smarter, then we won't be able to simply pull the plug and turn it off. It is more likely that it will be able to pull the plug on us and turn us off. Some people have some ideas about how to contain it in the early stages by keeping it in a secure environment. But if someone makes a mistake and it gets out then we won't have the means to stop it.
Computers are no longer just machines we use and turn off when we are done with them. We are now totally dependent on computer and the internet. They control every aspect of our lives. Telephones are no longer pairs of wires from one place to another. It's streams of data packets. Your car doesn't just have a computer, it has dozens of computers. If you have a desktop computer with a cooling fan, the fan has a computer inside it.
Computers are in your refrigerator, your smartmeter has a computer. your radio has a computer, your TV has several computers, your camera, your credit cards, even your LED light bulbs have computers. Computers are as integrated into humanity as a whole as a bee hive is to bees.
If something destroyed all the computers in the world right now everything would stop. All phone communication would go down. No radio or television. No electricity. No gasoline. No food or water distribution. The internet is now to humanity what our nervous system is to our body. Cut the spinal cord and we die. Humanity wouldn't go extinct if the internet went down, but it would be as bad as a nuclear war. Billions would die within weeks.
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