Will AI be a Threat to Humanity?

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Table of contents

  1. The Evolution of Technology and the Rise of Artificial Intelligence
  2. The Foundations and Advancements in AI: From Turing to Modern Applications
  3. AI as Humanity's Existential Threat: Concerns and Arguments
  4. The Double-Edged Sword of AI: Benefits and Risks
  5. Debating AI's Future: Threat or Boon to Humanity?
  6. Conclusion: The Power of AI and the Responsibility of Humanity

The Evolution of Technology and the Rise of Artificial Intelligence

In a world where technology plays a significant role in individual lives, technology focuses on the latest inventions and devices designed to make people daily activities easier, faster and more convenient. Technology have 4 ages, first is the electromechanical age which is designed in 183’s which mainly focus on the beginning of telecommunications. Second is the pre mechanical age in 3bc to 145 ad which focus on the age of information technology. Third is the mechanical age back in 145 to 184 where it is the era of mechanical age when we first start to see connections between our current technology and its ancestors. This explodes the interest of many people with this area. The last age is electronic age in 194 to present which basically what we currently live in. Come to think of it, do we people know what really happen back then? How our technologies evolve so fast? How people cope with this evolution? And how this technology can affects us? Basically, history of invention of tools and techniques and is similar to the other sides of history.

The Foundations and Advancements in AI: From Turing to Modern Applications

The term came from the Greek word techne which means art and craft. It was first used to describe applied arts but now it is used to describe the advancement and changes around us. It starts with the beginning of life on earth, and goes until the founding of early modern technologies, such as computer and nuclear power. We often think about technology as the latest innovation: the smart phone, the 3D printer, the VR headset. It’s only by taking a longer view, however, that we can understand its entwining with our species’ existence. For technology is more than a computer, cars or gadgets. It is the entirety of human-made artifacts that extend and amplify our grasp of the world. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt put it in 1958, we have in recent centuries developed a science “that considers the nature of the Earth from the viewpoint of the Universe”. Yet in doing so we have paradoxically trained ourselves to ignore the most important lesson of all: our co-evolution with technology. In this paper we will mainly focus in artificial intelligence and if it is a threat to humanity or not. The term artificial intelligence was coined in 1956, but AI has become more popular today thanks to increased data volumes, advanced algorithms, and improvements in computing power and storage. During the Second World War, noted British computer scientist Alan Turing worked to crack the ‘Enigma’ code which was used by German forces to send messages securely. Alan Turing and his team created the Bombe machine that was used to decipher Enigma’s messages. The Enigma and Bombe Machines laid the foundations for Machine Learning. According to Turing, a machine that could converse with humans without the humans knowing that it is a machine would win the “imitation game” and could be said to be “intelligent”. Early AI research in the 1950s explored topics like problem solving and symbolic methods. In the 1960s, the US Department of Defense took interest in this type of work and began training computers to mimic basic human reasoning. This early work paved the way for the automation and formal reasoning that we see in computers today, including decision support systems and smart search systems that can be designed to complement and augment human abilities. For somehow they taught it will transform the world.

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AI as Humanity's Existential Threat: Concerns and Arguments

Speaking at mit in 214, he called artificial intelligence humanity’s “biggest existential threat” and compared it to “summoning the demon”. Upon reading that statement the writers agree that artificial intelligence is a threat to humanity. It is about building machines that can think and act intelligently and includes tools such as Google's search algorithms or the machines that make self-driving cars possible. While most current applications are used to impact humankind positively, any powerful tool can be wielded for harmful purposes when it falls into the wrong hands. Today, people have achieved applied AI, AI that performs a narrow task such as facial recognition, natural language processing or internet searches. Ultimately, experts in the field are working towards artificial general intelligence, where systems can handle any task that intelligent humans could perform, and most likely beat us at each of them. Definitely it is a threat to humanity; it is poised to disrupt our world. Having invasion of privacy and social grading it is now possible to track and analyze an individual's every move online as well as when they are going about their daily business. Cameras are nearly everywhere, and facial recognition algorithms know who you are. AI machines are like other human beings in terms of their capacities for decision and action. They cannot be compared to other machines as the degree of independence that AI technologies have is much more complex. AI is an attempt to reproduce super intelligent humans. It chooses one aspect of human beings, namely the intelligence, and artificially magnifies it to an extent that allows the machine to do things far better than humans can.

The Double-Edged Sword of AI: Benefits and Risks

AI is associated with superlative memory, calculative power, decision-making capacity, high speeds of action, etc. These machines thus become super-beings, and a society filled with many super-beings is a recipe for disaster. AI machines are a mirror to our desire for immortality and the absence of human weaknesses. Most importantly, the AI has not been used to get rid of poverty, to have a more equitable distribution of wealth, or to make people more content with what they have. Instead, they will primarily be dictated by profit for the companies that make them. With intelligent machines enabling high-level cognitive processes like thinking, perceiving, learning, problem-solving and decision making, coupled with advances in data collection and aggregation, analytics and computer processing power, AI presents opportunities to complement and supplement human intelligence and enrich the way people live and work. On the other hand, some of the leading scientists and thinkers have warned about 'technological singularity'. Technological singularity refers to the belief that ordinary humans will someday be overtaken by artificially intelligent machines or cognitively enhanced biological intelligence, or both. You've seen a lot of science fiction movies about the negative impacts of Artificial Intelligence (Ai) and its benefits too but there will always be negative consequences along with the good. Humans are now beyond genius. It's power that ultimately alters people's lives. Artificial intelligence in daily tasks may generate laziness on the part of humans. If people have lost 95% of all their jobs in the world to robots, would we prefer to be substituted by a robot or another Artificial intelligence? That's the human problem, we like the easy way. On the other side, there’s a disadvantages of Artificial Intelligence. One of these are, the kind of technologies are expensive to made and costly if there’s any problem or need to fix on machines. It is also expensive to implement some technologies or machines. Second, all human will be independent to machine that will result to human dependency on their lives. Most of the people want an easily life and mostly and instant life. Third, the rate of unemployed people will increase because of the machines works instead of human power. It will also result to poverty, and besides it is the rights of people to have a decent job especially those people who studied in particular field. Overusing and abusing the machine shows how humans are dependent to work on their own, this shows how people will not use their minds, abilities, and creativity anymore to produce or provide different things. And lastly, it can probably replace human from doing in particular workplace. By this situation, we will not recognize as a great worker because most of the people will have more trust to machines rather than humans.

Debating AI's Future: Threat or Boon to Humanity?

In the counter view part when you understand the deeper view of artificial intelligence would this thought crossed your mind? “Artificial intelligence is made by human why will it be a threat to humanity if human made it?” The threat is not in the technology but in the humans who use such technology. For example, guns don't kill, only people do. It should be remembered here that technology is as useful as it can be harmful. Technology will always be under our control and so we can literally pull the plug when we want. From paper to the telegraph, from steam engines to computers, human beings have always feared new technology. Yet, we know from history that we have always embraced technology eventually, to make our life better, easier. There's no reason to believe that our future with AI will be any different. Healthcare and medicine become affordable and accessible with AI taking centre stage in telemedicine and quick diagnosis. Water and energy networks become accessible and widely usable when AI can mediate the use of different sources. Even though it can be a threat to the people around it, it still have an advantages especially to those field in community that really need some innovated materials in order to develop and improve the things around them. Some of the advantages that artificial intelligence has are first; obviously it can help the way of living of humanity. Especially in human labor, there are a lot of areas in workplace that can help to do precisely, accurately and fast the work of laborer. This kind of innovation is necessary to all agricultural field because with the help of Artificial Intelligence it can be done easily and fast because AI can work 24/7. Second, it can definitely enrich the flow of economy. These technologies helps country to develop and improve their lives to be more modernized. The progress of economy will probably increase and if possible it can have partnership to other country. And lastly, it can be program with specific skill that the machine can do, so that it can perform better and less errors. This kind of innovation can help to ease the human errors especially in a dangerous field.

All of these readings boil down to power, because people tend to believe science basically because it is science, everything in earth is science that it goes down to manipulation. As for evidences, Lewis was not anti-science, but was opposed to 'Scientism', which may be defined as the 'wrong-headed belief that modern science supplies the only reliable method of knowledge about the world and also that scientists should be the ones to dictate public policy and even our moral and religious beliefs simply on the basis of their scientific expertise.' There was a similar relation between science and culture when Lewis lived to our own. Then as now, there were: claims that science provides a view that refutes the traditional religious view. Claims that someone is anti-science if they are skeptical of certain claims made in the name of science. Claims that public policy should be guided or controlled by an elite class of scientific experts. Science as power is the most dangerous aspect of science's similarity to magic, which threatens the future of civilization itself. The critical difference between science and magic is that science 'works'. In discussing the tendency of science towards reductionism, Lewis noted that: 'As soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere nature, the whole process is stultified. By treating human beings as the products of blind non-rational forces, scientific reductionism eliminates man as a rational moral agent. Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of man.'Reductionism opens the door to the manipulation of human beings, with no effective limit on such manipulation because scientism undermines the authority of the ethical principles needed to justify those limits. Lewis demonstrates this in his science fiction trilogy. It is interesting to note that during World War 2, Lewis wrote not about the dangers of fascism or communism but about the danger of scientism. Scientism is the belief that the sciences have no boundaries and will, in the end, be able to explain everything in the universe. Scientism can, like religious literalism, become its own ideology.

Conclusion: The Power of AI and the Responsibility of Humanity

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race” Stephen hawking. It is believed that the purely intelligent creatures, whether people or machines are bad for humanity. On the other hand, AI, by itself, will not destroy humanity. Whether we use AI to augment ourselves, create new species, or use it to destroy lives and what we've built is entirely in our hands at least for now. No matter how dangerous AI might be for humanity, it's clear that there's no slowing down the pace of progress. Regardless of how many deponents come out against AI, there's no way to stop its advancement. Future discussions will help in directing AI for good rather than bad, but no matter what happens, there's certainly no stopping the wheels of progress as they slowly grind forward. Some of people see that it will save humanity, but most of people see that it will destroy humanity. If we look around, we seem to embrace the change being brought by the technologies but we must ensure that even though we adopt those technologies, we will not abuse these machines and use those technologies in a proper way that no one will be harm. The application of being responsible of all humanity are important, we can think of a way that people will improve their lives with their own hands and not only by the power of technologies. Artificial Intelligence can destroy human if we let it happen and if it goes into wrong hand and wrong application. In a future where benefits and risks are ‘incalculable’, it will be how humans choose to use the technology that decides whether it’s good or bad. To harness the power and benefits of machine learning we need to decide what we want machines to ‘learn’ and/or do, and what questions we want them to answer. It is clearly important that controls and goals for AI are set, and that a lot more empirical work needs to be done to gain a better understanding of how goal systems in AI should be built, and what values the machines should have. It is to ensure that we anticipate any negative health and safety consequences, assess the risks, and share this knowledge to benefit the future working world. In terms of reliability emotionally we might feel more comfortable with a human behind the wheel but I suspect studies reveal the machine is more reliable in terms of performance metrics. If over-reliance is placed on technology people could become disconnected from the process. They may cease to understand how things work become de-skilled or fail to appreciate how bad things are when they go wrong. The future is yet to be unknown but one thing is for sure human should be the most intelligent thing in this world and human should be aware of the data and information that you are sharing because once you have shared something it is impossible to bring it back.

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Will AI be a Threat to Humanity? (2022, Jun 09). Edubirdie. Retrieved December 22, 2024, from https://edubirdie.com/examples/will-ai-be-a-threat-to-humanity/
“Will AI be a Threat to Humanity?” Edubirdie, 09 Jun. 2022, edubirdie.com/examples/will-ai-be-a-threat-to-humanity/
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Will AI be a Threat to Humanity? [Internet] Edubirdie. 2022 Jun 09 [cited 2024 Dec 22]. Available from: https://edubirdie.com/examples/will-ai-be-a-threat-to-humanity/
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