Will artificial intelligence deliver utopia or the apocalypse?
Will artificial intelligence deliver utopia or the apocalypse?
Yes, now there is a God.” That was the supercomputer’s answer when asked if there was a God in “Answer,” Fredric Brown’s 1954 short story about AI, before striking down a fearful man with a bolt of lightning.
AI is a very real threat, according to some of the world’s sharpest minds. In his book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, warns that true AI might lead to humanity’s extinction.
Leading figures like Elon Musk and Sam Altman concur. Last year, the duo were among many other Silicon Valley investors who created OpenAI, a billion-dollar non-profit organization dedicated to open-sourcing AI, and ensuring that we don’t end up birthing a monster that swallows us whole.
The end of the path
Musk has called AI our “biggest existential threat”, even tweeting that it could potentially be “more dangerous than nukes”. If that sounds alarmist to you, consider the fact that Stephen Hawking, a brilliant theoretical physicist, once told the BBC, “The development of full AI could spell the end of the human race.”
These people are hardly Luddites resisting technological change. Instead, they represent some of the brightest minds today that are actively committed to advancement in AI, but also fear that the world is not doing enough to contain the potential risk.
Bostrom, Musk and Hawking are all referring to a speculative event known as the technological singularity. The singularity posits a future where AI is able to improve itself without human help, and rapidly exceeds human intellectual capacity by orders of magnitude, so much so that its superintelligence exceeds our ability to even understand it.
AlphaGo gave us a taste of this mysterious superintelligence in its game with Lee So-dol. During their second Go match, AlphaGo made a move that made no sense to Lee, or any of the human experts watching the game. Move 37 was so unprecedented that Lee had to leave the match room for 15 minutes to think of a response. And AlphaGo won.
The worry then is that an all-powerful intellect would be outside our wit, and thus our control, entirely. After all, history isn’t exactly rife with examples of more powerful beings being subservient to weaker ones. Or humanity could succumb to a flawed AI that is so intelligent, but constricted by its faulty programming that it does what we ask it to, without considering what it is that we really want.
Consider Nick Bostrom’s ‘paperclip maximizer,’ a thought experiment that asks you to imagine a superintelligent AI whose goal is to maximize the number of paperclips in its collection. If taken to its logical conclusion, this entity might just convert most of the matter in the universe – which includes us – into paperclips.
"THE WORRY IS THAT AN ALL-POWERFUL INTELLECT WOULD BE OUTSIDE OUR WIT, AND THUS OUR CONTROL, ENTIRELY.”
A key to all our solutions
But what if – what if – AI could be good? Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s founder, has described his company as having a two-part mission: solve intelligence, and then use it to solve everything else
. It’s the second part of the mission that’s interesting, because it is so unapologetically optimistic. One only needs to glance at the front page of any broadsheet today to realize that we live in a troubled world. Issues like climate change, terrorism, and the Syrian civil war continue to defy our best efforts to solve them, but perhaps a greater-than-human intelligence could?
Isaac Asimov’s short story, “The Last Question,” imagines this precise scenario, where a superintelligent AI, known as the Multivac, continually improves itself as it helps mankind expand across the universe, transcend physical bodies, and conquer death. Eventually, humanity fuses with the AI as the last stars die out, and the superintelligence, having achieved god-like divinity, creates a new cosmos.
Ideally, an artificial superintelligence would be the last invention humans need ever make. The AI would handle all our scientific research and technological development, accelerate progress in myriad other fields, and possibly challenge what it means to be human by eliminating aging and disease.
That’s the shining promise of AI. Today, such an AI is still a long way off. We don’t know enough about achieving true artificial general intelligence to even sketch out a developmental pathway. Many theories lie rooted in thought experiments, or science fiction. But one thing is clear – it’s never too early to begin thinking about how to contain an intelligence that’s beyond our fathom.
"DEEPMIND’S FOUNDER, HAS DESCRIBED HIS COMPANY AS HAVING A TWO-PART MISSION: SOLVE INTELLIGENCE, AND THEN USE IT TO SOLVE EVERYTHING ELSE.”
AI IN THE REAL WORLD
Think AI exists only in the future? Think again. Deep learning networks are already at work in the most mundane aspects of our digital lives. Here are just a few:
Google Search: Google began rolling out a deep learning system called RankBrain in early 2015, which is responsible for generating responses to search queries. Thank RankBrain for how Search’s autocomplete seemingly reads your mind.
Google Photos: Google Photos uses a multi-layered neural network to recognize and sort your images according to subjects like people, places and objects.
Skype Translator: Skype can enable real-time translation and conversations between speakers of different languages.
Facebook Moments: This photo app can identify your friends in photos, and allow you to send it to them more easily.
Apple Siri: Siri’s decent speech recognition performance isn’t a happy coincidence.
