Ai, blessing or curse in disguise?
Artificial Intelligence is not a foreign concept today. With advancing technologies and no limits to imagination, it is bound to become a necessity in the years to come. However, with every pro comes a con and with AI comes a threat.
Elon Musk the co-founder, CEO and Product Architect at Tesla and CEO of SpaceX, believes AI to be a serious threat to humanity. When he says this, he is not referring to the kind of artificial intelligence that companies like Google, Uber, and Microsoft currently use but what may be called super-intelligent entities often found in sci-fi movies.
The fact that Musk is actually one of those people who is investing and improving the world of technology, his saying something like this cannot be waved off as an unintelligible thought. Elon actually called the way scientists were approaching this technology, ‘the summoning of a demon’. He says the development of AI must be regulated.
At the US National Governors Association summer meeting in Providence Rhode Island, Musk said: “Normally the way regulations are set up is when a bunch of bad things happen, there’s a public outcry, and after many years a regulatory agency is set up to regulate that industry.
“AI is the rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive. Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’ll be too late,” he told the meeting. “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”
At a V.F. summit, Elon Musk said that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity. When asked why AI could be dangerous he said if super-intelligent machines, particularly if they are engaged in recursive self–improvement and its optimization or utility function is something that’s detrimental to humanity, then it would prove to be very bad for us.
Mark Zuckerberg openly refuses to accept this idea though and says that it is ‘irresponsible’ of Elon to say such things. Later, on social media, Musk said that Mark Zuckerberg’s thinking on the subject was ‘limited’.
All of this led Elon into taking the famous ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ quote, to a whole new level. He has decided on ‘merging’ the biological brain to a digital one so as to enhance human capabilities. They call it the ‘neurallink’ or the neural lace. He has launched a California-based company called Neuralink Corp., The Wall Street Journal reported (Monday, March 27, 2017), to pursue “neural lace” brain-interface technology.
Put quite simply, this is basically adding a layer of AI to our brains. Elon says that it can be simply done by injecting a neural electrode which would interpret and stimulate the electrical activity of our brains. So if you are not very responsive or are just a normal person, don’t worry, Neural lace has got your back! (Only Lord knows what will happen if it’s injected into the brains of a genius).
The idea of this merger probably does sound obscure at first, but Elon Musk thinks it better to let this happen than letting us humans become ‘house-cats’ to AI.
For now, no one knows if AI will actually wipe out humanity or wage war against us, but we do see machines replacing humans every day. It may be a convenience in one perspective, but it leads to unemployment and poverty in another.
On the other hand, if the merger happens, humans will be improved and we will have a cyborg neighborhood to look forward to every day but we don’t know yet, the kind of problems that kind of life would bring us.
We will have to let time tell our story.
See you in the future!