AI - When do we stop?

Let me clear something up first. I'm writing this article on AI entirely on my own ;). Furthermore, this is not going to be popular opinion. It is just my opinion.

"AI" means different things for different people. For me, AI is the ability of an artificial system to think entirely on its own and create a new idea or thought sans any human interaction. Completely bereft of any input from a human being or another system. Anything short of this is simply a machine trying to learn or use its memory to regurgitate something.

We aren’t there yet, we have some concepts but they are still concepts.

I have spent much of my working life in the governance of IT systems. My thoughts meander around how such an artificial system, one which thinks on its own, could be governed. It would not be a natural person (to whom laws apply) hence it would not choose to adhere to those laws.

Where then are we going with this sort of invention? In my view, such a system would definitely attempt and succeed in the destruction of humans - not literally (like the Terminator movies) but metaphorically, from the perspective of being organised, cognitive people going about their everyday lives to becoming what would be the equivalent of the levels animals are at today. We may be kept and “bred” as humans but we will not be right up there in the cognitive chain.

So, where do we stop?

We can use systems to make our lives easier. When I say “our”, it is not a selfish collective - for example, making an organisation’s cost lesser by eliminating jobs altogether. That would lead to riots and anarchy if implemented on a large scale and the level of machine learning leading to automation must be controlled.

In my view, the level of automation we have right now is enough. Merely because we have the ability to go further does not mean that we should. We have to use our intelligence to know when to stop, not to keep going till we make the biggest mistake humanity can offer and then figure out how to solve things (if at all). Just because we realised we could turn forests into cities and did it, we are now waking up every day to climate change and its impacts and figuring out how to reverse its effects which would take decades, if not hundreds of years.