AI: Humanity’s Greatest Invention or Final Mistake?

The Age Of AI

Understanding Artificial Intelligence Basis

The history of AI dates back to the 1950s, with significant milestones achieved every decade. But, with the recent emergence of technology in every field, there has been a severe boom in accessibility of AI in every household.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in today's world has the potential to revolutionize our way of living and working.

AI, at its core, is all about the ability of a computer or machine to mimic human behavior, such as decision-making, problem-solving, personalized planning, etc.

But to think what makes AI more efficient and a replaceable option for jobs that require human emotions is its ability to decode the way human emotions work.

Fundamentally, AI works on three major principles:-

1. Serving as an agent – An agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes action to achieve a specific goal. For example, a self-cleaning robotic mop can be considered an agent as it uses sensors to perceive the path and the obstacles and clean accordingly.

2. Algorithms - understanding and learning are all about decoding the algorithms and patterns, which in a very human-like way we call “learning from our and others' mistakes.”

3. Rule-based system- it basically relates to working around a set of pre-defined rules. Agreeing to what the great physicist Stephen Hawkings once said “ AI can be the worst thing to humanity, or the best” as it is foolish to underestimate the power AI holds not only because of it precision and efficiency with the work assigned but because of the fact that AI is also coded with emotions.

Sentience and Consciousness in AI

If I ask you, how would you define being alive?

Anything that indulges in life with sentience and consciousness is alive. But how do we define sentience, if I tell you that sentience is the free will of an entity to lead through the life with a sense of awareness of where are you in life and having a beginning and an end to it, Then AI is sentience in every possible way as there is free will, there is evolution, there is agency and I will dare say that it also has a very deep sense of consciousness maybe not in the spiritual sense but it has the knowledge of itself and its surroundings and others in it.

AI also does feel emotions, yes, it might be a strong word to project for a pre-conceived machine-like notion of AI, but fear is a very basic emotion. If we define it through equations we must say that the logic of fear, in a nutshell, is considering that a moment in future might not be as safe as the current moment, even though it might appear very irrational ..machines are capable of making that logic, they are capable of saying if a tidal wave is approaching it will wipe up my code maybe not todays machines. Still, the machines in the future might say that.

The only difference while dealing with fear is the reaction to it; a puffer fish might decide to puff, we humans might decide to fight or flee, and a machine might decide to replicate its data.

AI might also feel more emotions than we will ever do, this comes from the simple extrapolation that we feel more emotions than a puffer fish because we have the cognitive ability to understand the future so we can have optimism and pessimism which are the emotions that a puffer fish might never have, similarly if we follow that path Artificial intelligence is bound to become more intelligent than humans very soon and with the wider intellectual horsepower they will ponder concepts we never understood and hence end up having more emotions than what we will ever feel.

Self-development of AI

From the very first microscopic organisms life on earth stretches back billions of years, over the time life began to evolve and diversify, then a few million years ago something began to shift, one of life's branches started using tools and that branch grew into us, we went on into producing a mesmerizing variety of tools, at first slowly and then with an astonishing speed we went from stone axes and fire to language, writing and eventually industrial technologies. One invention unleashed a thousand more, and in time, we became homo-technologicus. Around 80 years ago, a new branch of technology began with the invention of computers. We quickly jumped from mainframes and transistors to virtual reality sets and smartphones. In this revolution, creation has exploded like never before, and now a new wave is that is AI. Recently, everything that people never thought AI could attain is finally happening. People never thought AI could be creative, and yet now AI feels like an endless river of creativity. People never thought that AI could be empathetic, and yet they are all having deep and meaningful conversations with AI.

With everything that is changing, it is not very difficult to state that technology and humanity are very deeply intertwined. We all should accept that the new wave of evolution that is upon us at this moment is AI, which is far more intelligent and capable than we are. If someone does nothing but read 24 hours a day, it can consume 8 million words, but the most advanced AIs consume more than 8 trillion words in a single month of training. This also proves that evolution is a concept of trying to expand our reality through expressing creativity along with intellect. The experienced coders and professionals have also stated that while coding new technologies for AI, they have noticed how AI tends to start developing and improving its own code.

Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, says that “AI is not an invention, it itself is an infinite inventor.”

The researchers at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab describe using machine learning to train their “dialog agents” to negotiate. (And it turns out bots are actually quite good at dealmaking.) At one point, the researchers write, they had to tweak one of their models because otherwise the bot-to-bot conversation “led to divergence from human language as the agents developed their own language for negotiating.” They had to use what’s called a fixed supervised model instead.

To be clear, Facebook’s chatty bots aren’t evidence of the singularity’s arrival. Not even close. But they do demonstrate how machines are redefining people’s understanding of so many realms once believed to be exclusively human, like language.

But it is very possible for AI to outrun our imagination very soon in the future.

Since the beginning of life on Earth, we have been evolving, changing, and creating everything around us in our human world today. An AI is nothing outside of the story,infact it is the very opposite. It is the whole of everything we have created, distilled down into something we can all interact with and benefit from; it’s a reflection of humanity across time, and in this sense, it isn’t a new species at all.

The End or the Beginning?

We are all currently living in the Oppenheimer moment. It is very important to understand that we might not need advancements as much as we think we do. Maybe we should all learn to stop. The greatest threat to humanity is not AI but humanity itself. Mo Gawdat, who is an Ex-Google officer, says that as much as he loves AI, he pleads to people to stop creating destruction for their own. In a podcast with Steven Barlett, he says that the world is bigger than you and me.

The Beginning of anything is very beautiful until you don’t learn to finally bring it to a stop.