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| Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/blue-bright-lights-373543/ |
In the good old days, when AI was something that nobody had really heard of or cared about, you would come across stories of alien invasions in the shape of literature or scary sci-fi movies. These would more often than not paint bleak dystopian scenarios of hostile alien takeover, which would in most cases be thwarted either by nature causing the aliens to die off or involve the humans getting their act together and ridding themselves of the extraterrestrial menace that threatened their existence. Sometimes, as in the movie Avatar, the human race were the aggressors in far, far away galaxies.
So much were people taken in by the whole business of the possibility of hostile aliens lurking amongst us that people routinely started reporting alien and UFO (Unidentified Flying Objects). Why, the US Air Force even launched an official investigation, which went under the name of Project Blue Book, to probe purported UFO sightings.
While the world still obsesses with alien life and UFOs, with conspiracy theories being a dime a dozen, people are now assailed with the prospects of a life altering event that is no less scary than a full blown alien explosion- the advent and rise of AI. Technological advancements in the realms of AI, Internet of Things, and Machine Learning threaten to make mankind redundant in the sense that every economic and social function that it performs can be carried out artificially in a much more efficient manner by such technologies.
From teaching, reading, and writing to healthcare, art, entertainment, factory production, banking, and military functions everything can be performed by artificial entities, increasingly without much human oversight. The way that technologies pertaining to these are advancing, the day is not far when there will be no human involvement in the decisions such entities will make. Who is to say how these autonomous entities empowered by artificial intelligence might evolve with regard to their thought process? Could they decide that the human race itself, with its proclivity to exploit and damage the very resources that nurture it, should be put to sleep and a brave new world order comprising indestructible machines or robots who exist in perfect harmony with its environment?
The fact of the matter is that the world of AI is here, and there is no escaping it. The question is, what are we going to do to prevent its complete takeover of our lives and ultimately our very existence? Do we have it in us to ensure that AI is leveraged as nothing more than a very useful tool that can help us do the various things we do efficiently? If you hire a househelp, you do so to make your life easier and not let your househelp become your overlord who will decide your fate.
Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a cohesive worldwide strategy to regulate the use of AI. It has been left entirely to the captains of the ever-expanding and growing technology behemoths for whom profit trumps every principle known to lead to the betterment of humankind. That cannot augur well for the world. Look at the way that the unregulated access to social media has wreaked havoc with the development of the impressionable minds of children and teenagers around the world.
We cannot even begin to visualise the kind of capabilities AI will possess in five to ten years from now. It will be able to bend our notion of reality as we now know it and replace it with another one, which could possibly be more bizarre than we can possibly imagine. Is “progress” worth that kind of price? This is something that the greatest scientific minds of our times have been repeatedly pointing out to us, and we better pay attention. AI has to be regulated, controlled, and tamed. It is a matter of our very survival
