Will Artificial Intelligence End Humanity?

You’ve probably heard of or witnessed technologies being integrated into your company. Furthermore, those technologies are performing tasks that a human once did. Human’s being replaced by innovation is nothing new and has been occurring since the third industrial revolution. However, the fourth industrial revolution is integrating technologies, specifically those that may impact society more profoundly.

IBM defines Artificial intelligence as the ability to leverage computers and machines to “mimic” the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind. The word mimic is used intentionally in this definition to ensure that we do not mean intelligence that is equivalent to humankind.

Common Artificial Intelligence Use Cases

Whether we realize it or not, we leverage solutions or applications that are supported by artificial intelligence.

Chatbots

You’ve probably seen, used, or minimally been pinged by a chatbot recently. They are used by many websites and are leveraged to answer common questions related to the site. Chatbox-level AI, specifically the Natural Language Processor, interprets what is being asked and returns an appropriate response.

Digital Assistants

Digital assistants such as Siri, Google, Alexa, and Cortana also leverage Natural language processing to interpret the request and return the appropriate response.

Online Photo Storage

Chances are you leverage online storage to some degree to store photos. Over the past decade, features have been added to these services that can analyze the content of the photos themselves. Services like google photos can automatically group photos by faces, places, holidays, or scenery. Additionally, you can search your photo repository for specific details. For example, you can search for all photos that have flowers. Google photos leverage cognitive AI to perform many of these functions.

Artificial Intelligence Use will continue to grow

You can guarantee that AI will continue to develop rapidly in our society for a number of reasons.

Aging Global Population

There’s been a slow and growing problem as it pertains to our society. Many developed nations are seeing birth rates drop and their overall median age increase. In other words, more people are dying and aging than being born. There will be an increased need for technologies and solutions to accommodate this new world. In the next decade, 16% of the world’s population will be over 70 years old. Adding to the issue is our life expectancy continues to rise. This growth could challenge the traditional healthcare models. This is where AI comes in.

Globally Shrinking workforce

In addition to the population aging, the global workforce is shrinking. This has been thoroughly discussed in many news outlets. The food services and hospitality industries have been acutely affected. In response, many restaurants are leveraging AI to power automation. In the near future, the drive-through voice may be a pleasant computer-generated voice powered by natural language processing.

Will Artificial Intelligence spell the end of humanity?

The short answer is no; however, it will be a major disruptor in many ways. The first thing to get out of the way, is we’re not talking about a Skynet type of AI. AI in use today is considered narrow. It is not an entity that is able to sense, feel, think and act like a human. Narrow AI can only operate within a pre-defined set of functions to address a specific concern or need. That pre-defined set is mostly determined via data modeling.

The concern most people have from a, we are all just batteries living in a simulated world, is classified as artificial general intelligence.

What is Data Modeling

Data modeling is effectively a training mechanism for Artificial Intelligence. The training can be supervised and geared toward a specific outcome. For example, you want to train the algorithm to recognize pictures of fish. The training may not have a specific goal in mind.

Training can also be unsupervised and data is fed into an algorithm with no prescribed outcome. The goal is to understand if the algorithm finds anything relational within the data.

There’s also a hybrid of the two that can be leveraged as well. Regardless of the tactic, the more data you feed the algorithm the more it learns and the more useful the algorithm becomes.

A narrow AI will never question the value of it being able to identify a fish in a photo. Humans have complete control of the algorithms and the training of those algorithms.

The intent of narrow AI is a reflection of humanity

In other words, Narrow AI does not have intent only the person training the model. What the AI is able to do is directly related to the intent of its trainer. To that end, it would be very easy to leverage AI for good or evil, which is a problem in itself lately as the term evil seems to be defined by the side you support.

The Good

Healthcare will definitely benefit from artificial intelligence. Healthcare can leverage AI in many aspects of the organization, such as billing, healthcare, and supply chain.

As an example, IoT smart devices enable the active monitoring of patients outside of the clinic, allowing vitals to be monitored in real time. These devices are non-invasive in most cases typically taking the form of a bracelet, ring, or patch that is attached to the body. The data that is captured can be used in a variety of ways. AI can be trained to recognize anomalies in the data and act on them.

AI could perform a number of actions such as:

• Simply notifying the primary physician of anomalies
•  Adjusting the dosage of a currently prescribed subscription
•  Call emergency services if a medical emergency is detected

As our population ages, and with a shrinking workforce, AI could potentially be the technology we need to ensure our aging population has the support it needs to thrive.

The Bad

Society struggles to decipher the truth from theory and false information. Large swaths of the population have lost trust in government and scientific entities. Furthermore, they leverage sources that they deem are more trustworthy. Even news outlets insulate the readers from certain articles based on their political motivations.

The Political

We have a variety of ways that we can communicate, but lately, those technologies are leveraged to speak at rather than to each other. There have been many articles that discuss how foreign entities have leveraged social media and our current social state to influence the minds of millions.

AI could in theory be trained to be ultra-liberal or conservative. It could then be leveraged to distribute information that supports a certain agenda or convince enough of us to vote for leaders that support a similar agenda. In a worst-case scenario, it can influence acts of vandalism and violence.

The Fringe

Then there’s the dark web aspect of things. Where an AI could be trained as a mysterious figure with deep government clearance, that provides fringe theories about politicians or political parties. Influencing members of society to take action against perceived threats against themselves or the country.

AI displacing Humans will be the larger concern

AI is getting frighteningly more sophisticated and, with each passing day, I find an article that discusses some new impressive feats that are accomplished. Most recently I’ve been reading about ChatGPT and its remarkable capabilities. For the uninitiated, ChatGPT is a natural language processor AI that allows you can ask questions. ChatGPT has written essays, code, and research papers. Interestingly, ChatGPT doesn’t necessarily know anything, it obtains its answers from harvested text from the internet combined with human-assisted training. Right now ChatGPTs, responses may not be entirely accurate although it responses appear to be authoritative.

The first concern is what happens to humanity when ChatGPTs, as well as other AI, as it continues to learn. Even with a shrinking workforce, AI could potentially displace millions of workers in the next 10 to 20 years. The table below list several ways AI is being trained to displace many of us in the future.

Industry	Description
Logistics	Autonomous vehicle technology are being tested to drive long haul trucks Related_Article
Legal	Minor Civil and Citations may no longer require a human lawyer. Related_Article
Healthcare	Initial health diagnosis may be performed by AI in the future. Related_Article
Realtor	AI could be trained to find your dream home, schedule the visitation and potentially take care of most of the paperwork. Related Article
IT	AI can be trained in a variety of programming languages, potentially allowing anyone to simply tell the AI what it wants in an app vs. having to build it themselves.

How does the economy adjust to a society where many jobs in almost every industry can be performed by AI?

What about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)?

For now, that’s the stuff of science fiction and future dreams. It’s interesting to theorize what would or could happen in that scenario. I would assume we would be aware of the initial achievement. However, once that occurs, what’s next? This is a level of conscience, not just something that mimics our behaviors, but has its own unique set of behaviors. AGI is where the doomsday scenarios abound.

One thing is for sure, we build our data to be redundant. That means whatever AI we build will be highly reliable and probably have failover capabilities in other regions. So shutting down the central core, as seen in every dystopian future movie where the computer/robots are trying to kill us tactically, would not be a viable option.

I would imaging we are at least a few decades away from the first AGI. Therefore you can rest easy knowing that we will most likely destroy ourselves well before AI will.