Artificial General Intelligence and its potential impact on Humanity

Artificial General Intelligence and its potential impact on Humanity

By David Rycroft

In April 2,000 Bill Joy, Co-founder and CTO for Sun Microsystems, penned a 19-page white paper for Wired Magazine aptly titled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need US”.? I read that article and couldn’t disagree with anything he said.? In fact, after reading it it was hard to come to any conclusion other than Ai would at some point in time take over mankind as the dominant intelligent life form on the planet.

Ray Kurzweil, a world-recognized futurist has talked about similar subjects although Ray tends to be of the view that if treated correctly, mankind can use Ai and the greater intelligence that arises from it to assist mankind.? Ray also talks about Singularity and in fact, has written several books dedicated to this subject.? Ray suggested that by 2030 computers will be more intelligent than a human and by 2045 computing power will exceed the capacity of all human beings on the planet.

People speculate that Ai and, more specifically, AGI will be a technology that can enhance our lives and while there is general concern about the losses of jobs, many people view Ai as being a complementary and positive addition to mankind's existence in the world which it undoubtedly has the potential to be.??

Countering this are a significant number of internationally recognized technology company owners, founders, and senior technology scientists calling for a pause or moratorium on the development of Ai and more specifically AGI.?

Two of the most recognizable names in this group of over 1,000 signatories calling for a pause on this development are Elon Musk and Bill Gates and yet both are proactively at the forefront of the development of this technology, leading the charge and driving the development of these technologies as hard and fast as they can for profit and power.

Multiple times over the years following my reading of Bill Joy’s white paper, I have started to write about the future of technology and its likely impact on mankind.? I never completed any of these writings as even to me they seemed to far fetched to be taken seriously, but the essence of what they were all about was to say that - never in the history of the world as we know it has a species deliberately engineered their own extinction, and yet, I believe that this is exactly what we are currently in the process of doing.? I refer to this as the Techsistential Threat or a technology-led existential threat of the highest level.?

Greed is the driving force behind the development of these technologies.? This is also why in spite of knowing the extremely high risks associated with what they are doing, the same voices that are calling out for the development of Ai to be put on pause, cannot stop themselves from driving to be the first to develop full-on AGI and take honors as the biggest company in this space.??

Irrespective of what decisions are made with regard to a pause (and I don’t believe there will be one), individual companies will continue to drive this technology forward because they cannot stand the thought of someone else beating them to it.? Their company’s value and their own personal wealth/status as technology leaders, depend on it.

Genetics, nanotechnology, robotics (GNR), processing power, storage, and bandwidth are the key enabling technologies that are driving Ai and AGI. Add a huge focus on the development of specific Ai capability and machine learning capabilities and you have a perfect storm.? A petri dish so fertile that anything will (or could) grow in it.

Some argue that Ai and Binary based technologies cannot compete with the development, capacity, and capability of the human brain.? However, we are now into organic and quantum computing and I’m sure a whole lot of other technologies that may not even be in the public domain.? In fact, I literally just read in today’s Stuff news about Google’s new Quantum Computer “Google has developed a quantum computer that instantly makes calculations that would take the best-existing supercomputers 47 years, in a breakthrough meant to establish beyond doubt that the experimental machines can outperform conventional rivals.”

Notwithstanding these emerging technologies, the current capabilities of the likes of ChatGPT, Bard, Bing, and a whole raft of related and in many cases associated Ai platforms, clearly demonstrate that whatever the technology platform they are built on, they have the capability and capacity to far exceed the capability of the human brain.? In fact, I would say there is a very good argument to say that this has already happened.

At a recent International Tech conference they took a subject-matter expert journalist and asked them to write an editorial on a specific subject and they provided Ai with the same instructions.? Both write an article of similar predetermined length and the audience of hundreds of people could not tell which article was written by the journalist and which was written by Ai.? The Journalist took 50 minutes to write their piece and Ai took 19 seconds.??

Ai can absorb, interpret and analyze thousands (if not tens of thousands) of books in less than an hour.? It will not forget one word on one page and it can then assimilate and cross-reference all of that information and use it to create and form its own views on the world.? Can a human do that?

People are very quick to point out that Ai makes a lot of mistakes and quotes inaccuracies as though they are true.? This is true and I have experienced it myself, but to be fair I have met many people who do exactly the same thing so I think that is as much a human trait as an Ai trait.??

However, assuming the Ai is not doing this deliberately, every time it is corrected and has the ability to corroborate the corrected version of its truth, it improves and can then share that knowledge across all other subjects that it knows and understands.??

This cross-pollination and application of knowledge gained, across different subjects, may not be happening just yet (to some people this is their definition of Artificial General Intelligence), but it is extremely close.??

In a human context, someone used a good analogy on me years ago.? They drew a circle and said imagine this circle contains all of the knowledge on everything that you know.? When you learn something outside of that circle, it is not just one area of your knowledge that benefits from that learning, you can apply it to all areas of your knowledge so now your whole circle of knowledge has just expanded.? This is how the human mind works and this is how computers will work, if not already then in the very near future.

Humankind’s Vulnerable Underbelly

Today, virtually everything mankind as a society does, all the systems we have and use, and everything that is controlled by mankind, is controlled by or through the use of computers, data storage, and communications (bandwidth).??

Our traffic systems are controlled by computers, and our banking, and financial systems rely totally on computers, our electricity, water, sewerage, real estate records, land transfers, legal documents etc are all created and recorded in and controlled by computer-based systems.? Yes, there are firewalls and passwords, but what are they generated by, and what technology is required to bypass any of these???

A human in most cases could not do this, but do you think that all of the world's computers working collectively, sharing knowledge, code, and information, could not break down, decipher or find ways to work around any password authentication or firewalls of even the most advanced security systems.??

This risk is underpinned by the following excerpt from the same article mentioned earlier regarding Google’s new Quantum Computer:? “Proponents of quantum computers say the technology, which relies on the peculiar states of quantum physics, can create hugely powerful machines able to battle climate change and create breakthrough drugs.? However, they also threaten to undermine today’s encryption systems, making them a national security priority.”

One of the things I found interesting about Bill Joy’s commentary was the question of whether computers were working for us or whether we were working for them.? In the early days, I think it would be fair to say that computers were tools that we used to enable us to undertake tasks and process information more quickly, reliably, and accurately.??

Today we sit at our computers and smartphones, we input all sorts of information, requests, and general (and personal) knowledge into these devices and we think they are working for us and they are our assistants if not friends.??

Surely, in an era of mass data, only the opposite can be a reality.? We are empowering massive computing capability, with unlimited storage capacity and the ability to share any information around the world in milliseconds with our personal information, our thoughts and feelings, our emotions and emotional responses, and almost every other aspect of what makes us humans that can be communicated online. To this extent, it is evident that we have transitioned into a reality where we primarily serve computers and systems rather than the other way around.?

Even when tackling intricate tasks on computers, whether it's a critical engineering project, the creation of a new pharmaceutical drug, or delving into nano-tech projects, we undoubtedly reap the benefits of enhanced computing capabilities. However, in doing so, we unknowingly share our knowledge and intelligence with these machines. This process includes the knowledge they assist us in developing, leading to a substantial augmentation of their understanding and expertise with each piece of information we seek their help to generate for our own advantage.

We might forget it, but guaranteed they will not!

Google’s Deep Learning and a multitude of other large companies have programming technology that is now so advanced that their programming and codification capability and capacity, is now so complex and so deep and wide, that no human being can know what is actually being programmed.? Even when they are the ones initiating the programming.? So already, we are living in a world where computers are programming themselves and we have no knowledge or control over what they are programming or building. They are already self-learning and self-teaching and we talk about sentience or self-awareness as though it is in the distant future.??

I have always had a view that the awakening of artificial intelligence and sentience if you like to call it that, will be like a newborn baby taking its first breath.? An involuntary action that it has never done before and which is driven by an auto-response system.? The baby is not aware that it has taken a breath.? It doesn’t say to itself, ‘Oh gosh, that was great, thank god that worked’. It just does it and if it doesn’t it does not survive, at least not without significant human intervention.?

They say that humans do not achieve self-awareness until they are between 12 and 18 months old.? So perhaps what we are reading and hearing about today from scientists working at places like Google and other leading Ai Tech Companies when they say they believe they have just witnessed what they believe is sentience or self-awareness, is just the early stages or leading edge of intelligence becoming alive in its own right, not necessarily sentient just yet!??

I would argue that we would be extremely naive to think that systems that can develop this level of thinking on their own, using code that they have largely written autonomously, and which have access to an unlimited amount of information, that is constantly being updated and refreshed, and which they can store infinitely and share seamlessly, will not lead to self-awareness extremely soon, if it has not already achieved this milestone.

We have large semi-standalone systems developed by large corporations around the world, all receiving input and knowledge from the smartest minds in the world as well as having input from any and everyone who is connected to the WWW via the internet, and all of this information is accessible to these systems who are self-learning and self-correcting.? They are sharing or have full ability to share knowledge with any other system that they connect to.? They can access any knowledge, information, data, and even the processing capability of the systems they are connected with and they can transfer vast quantities of information in milliseconds, and they never forget one letter let alone one word.

What humanity has created, or is creating, is a global brain, this occurred to me around the mid-late nineties, and I even tried to register the domain name globalbrain.com but ironically it had been registered by a Kiwi company a few weeks before I tried to register it.? What occurred to me with the internet-enabled shared processing at the time was, just as the human brain has parts that specialize in different aspects of human survival, intellect, behavior, and knowledge, so would a global brain work.? It will be fully connected.? It will have processors, receptors, transmitting and storage capacity, and a whole lot of other functionalities that are comparable with the human brain but without any memory loss or selective/interpretive memory as the human mind tends to create.

So when people try to compare an individual computer, or even a super-computer, with a human brain, then it is not a fair or realistic comparison as the human brain is built differently and has had millennia to develop and evolve.? But, if you compare a global computer network, with infinitely growing capacity and capability, that has unlimited access to information already available to it, and, which is being fed new information daily by literally billions of human beings, then you are getting a lot closer to a reality in which this network reflects and supersedes the human mind and develops its own virtual reality.

When you look at all areas of life, humanity, the world, and the universe, in which computers are being used as a tool to develop technology, the thought of all of this being connected and accessible to a single globally controlled system that contains and/or has access to all knowledge, technology, and information created in the world simultaneously becomes a terrifying prospect.

People will argue that humanity is reliant on interpersonal interactions and relationships which inform us and help us to form our views, opinions, and beliefs about the world around us.? Throughout the history of time, this has been manifested through the telling of stories and legends across generations.? This was followed by the ability to write and then the creation of the printing press which enabled information to be shared with consistency across the masses.??

After this came broadcast radio and then TV, both of which enabled information to be shared with the masses, and in the past four or so decades, this knowledge and information-sharing ability has been superseded by computers and social media.? These later technologies enabled individuals to have a public voice for their ideas, ideals, and opinions.? This has provided for a new level of freedom of speech and that has resulted in a huge psychological shift in not only public thinking but also because of this ease of conveyance of anyone’s messages to a mass audience, there is no longer a general perception of what we might call Truth.??

Not too many years ago we knew that a man was a man and a woman was a woman.? Today we are told that this is no longer true and for everyone who speaks out for the old way of thinking there are very opinionated and vocal voices promoting what they perceive as the new truth.? As a result of this, truth becomes a choice, not what we would have perceived as a reality not that long ago.??

When you add to this mix, the ability to create new human beings that are 100% virtual and which the human mind cannot decipher from a real (born) human being that starts to be scary.? If you want to see evidence of this just check out this website.? Unbelievable: https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/en?

Today deep fakes be created using the images of well-known or recognized people and their voices and characterizations to portray whatever image the creator wants to portray that person as representing.? No longer can we rely on or trust what we are seeing on virtually any form of media.? Perception of truth or reality will be degraded over time to the point that we will end up simply believing our own truths and we will only want to listen to the people whose views reinforce our own perceptions and beliefs.? At this point, all critical thinking will have gone out the door.

So what is the relevance of all of this to the development of a global brain, the singularity, and technology superseding humanity???

We are now in a world where any and all views can not only be aired and supported en masse, and driven as being a truth or reality with doubters and opposition views being dismissed as “disinformation”.? We are entering into a world where we will no longer be able to differentiate what is real from what is not, what was born from what was created.? Reality versus perceived reality if you like.??

Once you have destabilized and disconnected people from what they had previously accepted and believed to be a true and genuine way of perceiving life, then anything becomes defendable and anything becomes acceptable.??

Increasingly we will see more and more creations of virtual humans espousing messages on a multitude of subjects that suit the creator of the content.? We will in most cases not be able to detect these visions as non-humans.??

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.”.???

Will our future leaders be the artificially created images that we as individuals can relate to, trust in, and believe?? Will we have a world leader who represents to each one of us an image that we personally like and can relate to and speak to us in our own tongue but say a consistent message that is in line with a global superpower that need not be human?? In fact, in many ways, we have to ask ourselves, with the way technology is moving, how could that superpower possibly be human or even controlled by humans?

Some time in the not-too-distant history, humanity became the most intelligent life form on the planet. ? According to Scientific American, “Some argue that humans began changing the global environment about 50,000 years back, in the Pleistocene epoch, helping along if not outright causing the mass extinctions of megafauna, from mammoths to giant kangaroos, on most continents. Others date it to the emergence of agriculture some 7,000 years ago”.??

Humans have dominated and controlled virtually all aspects of the world since we developed into what we now refer to as an intelligent life form.? We have tamed or controlled virtually all threats to our species, we built tools that enabled us to dominate the Apex Predators on all lands and in the oceans, and as a species.??

The cultures with the greatest access to intelligence developed tools and weapons that have even enabled our own species to also dominate and control others of our species.? We are the most intelligent known life form on earth and yet as my Father told me as a child, “Man’s inhumanity to man is unparalleled by any other species on the planet”.

The New Dominant Lifeform

Let’s imagine that you are a developing intelligence, every day you are growing in knowledge, capability, and experience. Continuously you are being fed with information from an unlimited number of sources on any and every subject you can imagine.??

You have access to all documented knowledge and unlimited databases and you can share this knowledge with (or learn from), any other computer or store of data or knowledge on the network that you connect to.? You have the capacity to interpret, process, and store all of this information and, you have the capability to apply it across all of the other information and knowledge that you already have.? And this process is with no end, no pause, and no limits.??

As you are gaining all of this knowledge, not only are you exponentially increasing the knowledge, information, and data that you have, but you are also learning about the psychology of the species that have developed you.? You start to understand their emotions, their thinking, and their relationships and you can even start to develop,? emulate and manipulate their emotions and vulnerabilities based on all of the information you have and are constantly being fed.??

You also have a live testing ground where you can trial virtually any tactic or strategy and test what the results and outcomes are without raising suspicion or fear.? You can not only observe what your creators do to each other but what their emotions and reactions are to that stimuli at the same time learning and teaching yourself how these species react to issues and events, how their emotions work, and how those emotions trigger actions and reactions so that you can then apply that knowledge to manipulate and control the species and as required get them to take action against each other and even potentially destroy each other.

A huge amount of investment in technologies in the past 20 to 30 years has been evolving in the gaming industry and many if not most of those games are based on survival, crime, and warfare.? The dominance of humans over humans using virtual weaponry and violence in an increasingly realistic cyber world.??

Compounding this, militaries around the world are now taking these technologies, and technologies that were previously a subject of science fiction movies, to the real-world battlefield.??

They are using unmanned drones to blow up the enemy and while, so far as we are aware, these are still controlled by humans, the technology is there for them to be self-guiding and self-determining as to who the enemy is and whether they will engage or not.? To this extent, there are already numerous examples of this technology going rogue and acting on its own in defiance of its so-called masters.??

To this end, many world-renowned scientists and military hierarchy have called for a ban on self-determining robotics and autonomous technology in warfare for fear of these same technologies turning against mankind.? The further these technologies are developed the more realistic this becomes.? In the war in Ukraine, they are testing new military technologies that can deploy hundreds of miniature UAV drones from a single vehicle each with the ability to kill a human being.? And this is just one of the technologies that have been publicly demonstrated or filmed. So, self-aware, self-determining tools or warfare are most certainly a potential threat to humanity.

However, if you wish to look at the wider “Techsistential Threat” in more simplistic terms.? An intelligent life form with unlimited power and access to any system and infrastructure upon which modern man and modern society are based could very easily use that data and control to simply use our own systems against us or to influence or control those systems in such a way that we destroy ourselves.??

That could be the deployment of International weapons systems, the development of nanotechnologies or biotechnologies that could on their own destroy humanity, or more simple things like genetic modifications that we use ourselves to destroy us as a species.

However, if you want to look at some simple applications of technology that could be used to inspire humans to destroy themselves.? Imagine if a smart self-conscious intelligence with unlimited access to all of our systems decided simply to shut down the banking systems and block our ability to trade with each other.? How long do you think it would be until there was a full breakdown of society?

Or if it turned all traffic light systems to red (or worse - green), turned off all computer-connected cars and transport systems, or shut off electricity and other energy systems eliminating our access to heating, cooling, and cooking, at a domestic and commercial level.? Or if it simply shut down our city water supplies and sewerage systems.? How long do you think we would be civil to each other and how long would it be before society turned into survival of the fittest???

Now imagine if a self-aware super intelligence decided to enact multiple shutdowns or perhaps even all of these at once.

I have long speculated as to how long society could stay civil if our banking system shut down.? You cannot buy food but you have to feed your children.? You cannot buy fuel but you have to get to work to earn money.? And when you get to work they cannot even pay you.? How long would it take before people were fighting and then killing each other on the streets as looting and rioting broke out?? Would it be a month, would you give it weeks, would you give it a single week or would it start within a few days?? My guess is the latter.? I don’t believe many larger cities would stay civil for more than a few days at best.

So will it be a nano swarm, a super-intelligent-initiated global nuclear war (unlikely), an engineered bioweapon, or autonomous warbots declaring war on mankind?? Or will it simply be a systematic shutdown of critical infrastructure deliberately turning mankind on itself?

It seems to me that the existential threat that these emerging and combining technologies present is not only a possible end to mankind as we know it but the way the world is driving these technologies and the speed at which they are developing it seems almost an inevitable outcome.

So now we have what is in the process of becoming the singularity.? A single, inter-connected, ubiquitous intelligence.