AIMI by MC
I have been paying only cursory attention to the dramatic rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and its possible existential threat the human race. Serious people such as Stephen Hawking have warned about AI’s rising threat to humanity and have been counseling great caution to those involved in perfecting it.
One broadly understands AI and within it machine intelligence—let’s call that MI—and how its exponential improvement may some day soon reach a stage where they not only begin to rival humans but eventually even dominate us. Doomsayers have been warning about “robot armies” enslaving humanity. If machines—say computers—can develop an ability to learn far beyond what they are programmed, there is no predicting what behavioral restraints they may begin to breach.
There is a presumption MI could be free of any moral compunctions or emotional hesitation that humans are still by and large governed by. A coldly rational machine, which has its own powerful MI, could easily make decisions in a given situation which are driven by the rationale of utter efficiency without taking into account its human cost. It may be bereft of what we humans call compassion. I am not sure if compassion can be designed and built into the AI-MI or AIMI dynamic.
The idea of purely logical beings unburdened by any philosophical trepidation or emotional doubt whatsoever has long been celebrated in pop culture. However, given the AI-MI advances in the past five years or so there is a very real danger of things going out of control unless humans who create them do not embed failsafe commands that only humans control and the AI-MI entity cannot override ever.
It was from this standpoint that I read a piece in The Guardian by Olivia Solon about “a new breed of video and audio manipulation tools”. These are tools, which taken to their logical extremes, can essentially make any audio-video of anyone say anything that this kind of intelligence chooses. I suggest you read the piece for its very real implications. One obvious implication is in the growing use of “fake news” to make deep sociopolitical or sociocultural impacts by manufacturing news with highly credible looking but essentially fake audio-visual evidence.
If these tools are taken over by an AI-MI conglomerate, imagine the havoc it can create across societies. It is called puppeteering which lets a tool called Face2Face alter facial expressions of anyone in video realistically. It is not altogether inconceivable that in the near future there may rise a malignant AI-MI conglomerate which has at its disposal several such tools to cause lethal chaos within the human race as part of its takeover plan.
I am not even remotely an alarmist, let alone a doomsayer, but that does not prevent from seeing potential implications of a vast variety of such tools coming together in an AI-MI conglomerate and reaching a stage where we humans can no longer keep with its speed. The key threat to watch out for AI-MI’s ability to learn in a fuzzy, intuitive way beyond its core program like the way the human brain works. For instance, I am harboring several thoughts simultaneously while writing this post including some impending calls from my creditors even as I am painting digitally simultaneously while also thinking about whether to shave today or not.
Looking at the rise of AI-MI I keep returning to my continuing fascination with our universe being a simulation of a more advanced civilizations whose inhabitants may have consciously decided to up the technological ante as part of a game that they are playing. AI-MI fits rather well as part of upping the ante.