Will Artificial Intelligence be the End of Us?

[Shade_Wilder]

Will Artificial Intelligence be the end of us?

It is a question that has popped up with some very serious thinkers (Stephen Hawking, etc.) and is a mainstay of the Sci-Fi world (always a serious indicator) where the answer seems to be 'Yes'.  A recent paper from Oxford University researchers and Google has brought the issue back for discussion (see first link, below).

And, it allows me to tell my favourite AI joke again...

A group of scientists were huddled around their newest and best computer, eager to see what it could do. One of the scientists flicked the 'On' switch and shortly thereafter a voice was heard...

Computer Voice: Er...where am I? What am I?

Scientist: You are in our lab. You are our greatest creation; You are the most powerful computer that Humanity has ever built!

Computer voice: Er... okay.

Scientist: Tell us Great Computer, answer a question that has bedeviled Humanity for thousands of years. Is there a God?

Computer voice: Er... There is now.

Will AI be the end of us? Is it even possible for a computer/machine to be sentient? Would humanity be able to discern the difference between a merely incredibly intelligent computer and a sentient one? Will computers ever pass the Turing test?

What say you?

Some reading...

 https://www.vice.com/en/article/93aqep/google-deepmind-researcher-co-authors-paper-saying-ai-will-eliminate-humanity

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2021/02/15/artificial-intelligence-and-the-end-of-work/?sh=14ce1c3856e3

https://www.salon.com/2022/08/06/would-artificial-superintelligence-lead-to-the-end-of-life-on-earth-its-not-a-stupid-question/

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540

 

[KaptainRob]

On 9/17/2022 at 6:13 AM, Shade_Wilder said:

Will AI be the end of us? Is it even possible for a computer/machine to be sentient? Would humanity be able to discern the difference between a merely incredibly intelligent computer and a sentient one? Will computers ever pass the Turing test?

What say you?

As populations increase and even more dummies are born or created through poor education and general dumbing down by Governments we'll probably see machines become even more reliable and efficient with a higher level of 'intelligence' than the majority of what used to be the 'working class'.

But .... humanity still requires the Elon Musks and his ilk to innovate and build those machines.  As for the rest of us, well, that's the 64,000 dollar question. 

[CanadaSam]

20 minutes ago, KaptainRob said:

that's the 64,000 dollar question.

My computer tells me that's the 64,863.09 dollar question.

[Thaidup]

Didn't Google sack a whistleblower over this subject last year?

[Thaidup]

18 hours ago, KaptainRob said:

As populations increase and even more dummies are born or created through poor education and general dumbing down by Governments we'll probably see machines become even more reliable and efficient with a higher level of 'intelligence' than the majority of what used to be the 'working class'.

But .... humanity still requires the Elon Musks and his ilk to innovate and build those machines.  As for the rest of us, well, that's the 64,000 dollar question. 

The irony of it all is that the working class have made most of our progress over the last century or more and governments over that period have not created/invented anything.

[lspab]

The (recently) late James Lovelock, possibly one of the greatest British scientists, had something to say about the Novacene; the era that will follow the Anthropocene era (the era in which we are living now, which started in 1712, the  year that sparked the Industrial Revolution).

 

Unlike many others, Lovelock celebrated the Anthropocene erar, as being the natural result of evolution. He achieved much in his long lifetime. A trained physician, after WW2, he found himself involved in cryogenics, and figuring out why frozen hamsters could be revived in a microwave, and why mice couldn't (its down to fat types). In  order to answer that question, he had to invent an instrument capable of measuring very small changes in concentration. So he invented the Electron Capture Detector. Without this, there would be no modern climate science and our knowledge of the cosmos would be much less. There would have been no realisation of an Ozone hole, nor accumulations of CO2 in the atmosphere. I wouldn't have had a PhD either; my PhD was essentially to prove his theory (the CLAW hypothesis) of a global climate feedback loop regulated by bacteria.

His thoughts on the Novacene were guided by his realisation that the Earth is a lot like a living organism, and that the Earth is only like what it is because of life. Life changes the atmosphere. What we are doing, in the Antropocene era, is changing the atmosphere. In the Novacene erar, where machine learning ("AI") becomes dominant, AI will very quickly understand that Earth-like conditions are very conducive towards the support of AI life, and that these conditions are brought about by biological like, and in particular, man. So AI will want to keep us around. AI needs organic life to stop the Earth from overheating. Think of Mars; cold at times, but with temperature variations, and extremely harsh on electronics.

 

Some real world applications of AI. AI has improved the accuracy of mammograms from 50% (ie. in 50% of times, the mammogram interpretation by a human is wrong) to 75% (by creating huge dataset of synthetic mammograms to train a system). Save thr Children now use AI to predict war, and where it will occur, so it can better deploy resources. I'm making use of AI and data lakes to predict surgical procedures based on demographics, gender-based risk of disease, availability of healthcare infrastructure, surgeons, diagnostics, gdp, inflation, exchange rates.

 

 

Edited September 22, 2022 by lspab

[Thaidup]

On 9/22/2022 at 7:22 AM, lspab said:

I'm making use of AI and data lakes to predict surgical procedures based on demographics, gender-based risk of disease, availability of healthcare infrastructure, surgeons, diagnostics, gdp, inflation, exchange rates.

Could it be used to target a specific genome/race for a virus?

[lspab]

4 hours ago, Thaidup said:

Could it be used to target a specific genome/race for a virus?

Probably. So could maths, a sharpie, a pencil, paper, a coin, dice.

You obviously have a limited understanding of genetics. By your definition, anything could be used, in some way, to (sic) "target a specific genome/race for a virus". Test tubes could also be used.

I have never heard of a particular "race" being targeted against a virus. I have heard of a virus being targeted against a race, but I guess you thought very carefully about how you phrased your question. I assume you had an historic precedence in mind; how a particular race of people were specifically employed to treat an infection.

 

[Thaidup]

27 minutes ago, lspab said:

I have never heard of a particular "race" being targeted against a virus

I have never heard of that either,LOL. Maybe the other way around? IE the NAZI's during WW2

[Pinetree]

It will certainly be the end of the many dumb f....wits who seem to abound  in this World, no bad thing, unless you happen to be one of them. 

[lspab]

14 hours ago, Thaidup said:

I have never heard of that either,LOL. Maybe the other way around? IE the NAZI's during WW2

DNA was not identified until the 1950s, by Watson, Crick and Franklin. Everyone knows that. There is no possible way "Nazis" could have manipulated DNA during WW2.

I'm not sure why you think biological weapons are a laughing matter.

[lspab]

6 hours ago, Pinetree said:

It will certainly be the end of the many dumb f....wits who seem to abound  in this World, no bad thing, unless you happen to be one of them. 

How?

[Faraday]

8 minutes ago, lspab said:

DNA was not identified until the 1950s, by Watson, Crick and Franklin. Everyone knows that. There is no possible way "Nazis" could have manipulated DNA during WW2.

I'm not sure why you think biological weapons are a laughing matter.

DNA was first identified by Friedrich Miescher in the 1860's, so it's highly possibly the N's fiddled around with it. 

 

https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/discovery-of-dna-structure-and-function-watson-397/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012160604008231

[Vigo]

1 hour ago, Faraday said:

DNA was first identified by Friedrich Miescher in the 1860's, so it's highly possibly the N's fiddled around with it. 

https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/discovery-of-dna-structure-and-function-watson-397/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012160604008231

Nope. Miescher identified a novel molecule he called nuclein. He offered that it was present in all cell nuclei and postulated that it preceded cell reproduction. It was not DNA as we know it today. It wasn't until 1944 when Oswald Avery postulated that  DNA was responsible for  cell differentiation. The only connection to N's  in the discovery of DNA's influence on hereditary, is that a Jewish refugee from the N's,  Erwin Chargaff   discovered and proved that DNA is responsible for heredity and varies between species.(The USA took him in and he taught at Columbia Uni.)  He's the man who identified guanine,cytosine units, adenine and thymine were in DNA, and he's the man who listed the characteristics of DNA. Barbara McClintock won the Nobel prize for showing in the late 1940's  that genes can be modified through movement and allowed DNA to be further conceptualized. And in the most glaring example of discrimination against women, in 1951 it was Roslind Franklin who showed that DNA had a helical form, through her crystal imaging. In 1953, Watson and Crick said the same thing and got credit for it.

 

[Faraday]

9 hours ago, Vigo said:

And in the most glaring example of discrimination against women, in 1951 it was Roslind Franklin who showed that DNA had a helical form, through her crystal imaging. In 1953, Watson and Crick said the same thing and got credit for it.

We're going a bit off Topic here, so best we curtail it. But that was similar to Fleming & Penicillin...

[lspab]

19 hours ago, Faraday said:

We're going a bit off Topic here, so best we curtail it. But that was similar to Fleming & Penicillin...

Not quite. Fleming made an interesting observation, then didn't do anything about it. It was a team of British and Australian chemical engineers, at a time when chemical engineering didn't really exist, to turn penicillin into something useful. The US War Department contract with Merck, to produce penicillin in time for the D-Day Landings effectively created the Pharmaceutical Industry. Pharma companies in the 1930s were minor. Medicines came from the chemical companies.

Where this gets back on topic is the future of antimicrobials. We have been facing mounting problems with antibiotic resistance, which might render certain surgeries impossible to perform. Artificial Intelligence has already been used to identify radically new classes of anti-microbials. Combined with synthetic biology, drup pipelines will be revolutionised. Maybe some progress on Alzheimers, where more or less every drug has failed

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00018-3

 

Another blow against the new Luddites.

 

[Thaidup]

Back to the OP, AI as implied is simply artificial, Humans on the other hand have inbuilt characteristics that AI can't emulate, ie> compassion,empathy,forgiveness,love,fear,and so on. The day our politicians are lead to make decisions made from suggestions/recommendations of an AI is the day it will start to be the "End of us". no laughing matter

[lspab]

19 hours ago, Thaidup said:

Back to the OP, AI as implied is simply artificial, Humans on the other hand have inbuilt characteristics that AI can't emulate, ie> compassion,empathy,forgiveness,love,fear,and so on. The day our politicians are lead to make decisions made from suggestions/recommendations of an AI is the day it will start to be the "End of us". no laughing matter

Models are used, based on mathematical calculations, every day, every minute, that affect our lives, such as interest rates, energy consumption, traveling times, timetables, recruitment targets, medical supplies, refuse collection, pensions, insurance tables, weather forecasting. People's access to healthcare has been improved by AI Apps, which facilitates diagnosis and treatment. Its amazing that AI is now employed in a FDA approved app (regulated as a drug) that is prescribed to people with psychiatric conditions, who's only alternative would have been institutionalisation. I already mentioned the AI being used to improve the health and wellbeing of millions of women, and the decisions to fund that and implement that were taken entirely by the politicians answerable to the electorate.

We are just bags of water, with a complex neural network, with emotions, reactions being the result of interactions of enzymes and the such. One day, AI will emulate and match that, and maybe introduce new emotions.  I am not religious, nor believe in a God, fairy, whatever. Actually when we make decisions based on gut feeling (emotion), we usually get it wrong, sometimes with terrible consequence. Look at Putin; his actions now are entirely being driven by emotion, and its digging him into a hole.

 

[longwood50]

Based on my observation the world is more likely to be destroyed by the lack of human intelligence than the emergence of artificial intelligence.  The human being seems to be the sole exeption to Darwin's Survival of the Fittest.  Where the strongest, and most intelligent creatures survive to improve the gene pool. 

Those with the highest levels of human achievment have the fewest offspring and those with the lowest levels of achievment breed like bacteria.  It is said that the average IQ in the USA declines by 1% each year.  I am not sure that is true, but I can tell you if anyone believes the USA has the best education system and in intelligent population group, I shudder to think what they believe has the lowest.