Ex-Google Exec: By 2049, Artificial Intelligence Will Become “God” — and Master of Man?
More than a century ago, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the coming Übermensch, or superior man, and the “death” of God. Now Silicon Valley a-theologians predict the Singularity, the point at which artificial intelligence (AI) surpasses human intellect. Not only is this development less than a decade away, they say, but what they outline sounds like a science-fiction movie plot:
By 2029, artificial intelligence (AI) surpasses human intellect. Twenty years later, ultra-intelligent machines become a billion-fold smarter than even the cleverest among us, making the man-AI intellectual chasm like that between a fly and Einstein. That this will happen there is no doubt (barring the end of the world or the onset of some profoundly dark age), but, well, this is where it gets sticky. Does AI become an almost omnipotent, practically omniscient servant in the hands of oh-so flawed man?
Or does it somehow achieve self-awareness and, perhaps, become master?
In point of fact, one ex-Google executive “likens this digital creature to an ‘alien being, endowed with superpowers,’ which has already arrived on Earth in larval form,” relates Joe Allen at Substack.
Finishing the thought, that executive, Mo Gawdat, said bluntly, “The reality is — we’re creating God.”
A person of faith may scoff and say the reality is that this is impossible. But putting aside that Gawdat may be speaking loosely, that this Übermachine wouldn’t actually be as God in significant ways — in particular, it wouldn’t assuredly be benevolent — is what’s scary.
Allen writes about Gawdat’s predictions, stating that he has recently
been selling the idea of superconscious machines along with his new book, Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save the World. His central thesis is that AI has already surpassed us in narrow tasks like chess, Go, Jeopardy!, and Atari games. In fact, he believes on some level they’re already conscious. As machine learning improves, computers will inevitably best humans in every domain.
… Three decades from now, the story goes, the ghost in The Machine will be mightier than all the gods of Olympus, Meru, and Sinai put together. Gawdat likens this digital creature to an “alien being, endowed with superpowers,” which has already arrived on Earth in larval form. At present, we call it “artificial intelligence.”
Because machine learning processes draw information from morally suspect humans — part angel, part fallen angel — this Alien Computer God will either be humanity’s savior, or It will destroy us like lab mice who’ve exhausted their useful data.
As Gawdat writes in Scary Smart:
“To put this in perspective, your intelligence, in comparison to that machine, will be comparable to the intelligence of a fly in comparison to Einstein…. Now the question becomes: how do you convince this superbeing that there is actually no point squashing a fly?”
Of course, Gawdat is hawking not just ideas but a book, so being dramatic surely benefits him. Yet Übermachine AI has been predicted by many before him, notably renowned computer scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil. In fact, it was Kurzweil who convinced a previously skeptical Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, that sentient robots weren’t just science fiction, but could be “a near-term possibility.”
This inspired Joy, with no joy whatsoever, to pen the 2000 essay “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” He makes a number of good points about the possibilities upon the flowering of the Übermachine. Among them is that while we mayn’t want to relinquish all decision-making to the AI, we may gradually slouch into such dependency. After all, as the machines achieve greater intelligence and running civilization becomes increasingly complex, we may incrementally give them more control; the complexity could eventually reach a point where only the Übermachines could run the world, at which stage we’d be “so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide,” writes Joy.
Read more @ The New American
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