Will the machines kill us all?
Robots dropping from the skies. Food emerging from a tablet. Advertisements swimming from screens into our brain. Will it help us? Or will it hurt us? What will become of tomorrow? That’s the nature of the new conversation of HighCrown Talks: will the machines kill us all?
“The basic question you get is, will the machines replace us, or will they kill us? It makes sense to start with understanding why are human beings different at least then all the other species we are looking at in the world today,” William noted. “And the main reason is that we are toolmakers, we make tools. When we confront a situation that our anatomy, our physiology cannot deal with, we’re able to build tools that give us a solution.”
And the most prominent piece of the parcel we now need to wrap our heads around is grappling with the advancement of autonomous technology; artificial intelligence.
“Not only can I create a plane and fly, but I can create a plane that can fly itself. It doesn’t need me to fly, which is autopilot,” William continued. “Not only can I build a car, but I can have a self-driving car.”
Does this mean we are building artificial brains rather than intelligence? Will those machines, constructed to make decisions on their own, help make us mortals better? That would require making a conscious decision by design. We have to design machines that help us become better willingly.
But as Hollie points out, a way to view the evolving technologies – at least for now – is to see it as being akin to complementary medicine, conceived to enhance traditional treatments, which in this case is our own conscious mind.
“We need to rephrase the conversation and look at artificial intelligence as complementary to our own brain, as opposed to something that we fear is going to kill us or take over our lives or wipe us out,” Hollie underscored.
Yet how much control do we really have? As William stressed, machines are already figuring us out and taping cleverly into our behaviors and fears – and often times, we aren’t even aware of it.
“Now imagine I have a machine that can tailor the speech for each one of us,” William said. “I don’t even think it has to do with the will. Because what I have is a machine that, whatever I do to avoid it, learns my new pattern.”
But that brings us to the ultimate crossroads: two faces of the same coin. We can have machines playing against us and figuring us out. Or we as the human race can start using those machines to transform ourselves into a better version and solve the problems we could not have figured out on our own. Only we still need to interact with those machines.
“If human beings have a propensity to be violent, why not build a machine that helps correct the path in the brain that makes (one) aggressive and violent? Where I don’t need to be violent, because I can solve the bigger problem and not fight for the next piece of meat?” William pondered.
Hollie then brings to light other vital benefits to embracing AI and the machine-learning world: human relationships that function on a personal level without the invasiveness of another individual, and the preciousness of time.
“One commodity that we cannot get back in life is time. And if we can use all of this to make our lives more efficient – that is key to me,” she said. “That is time you can spend with your family, the time you can use doing things you love, like sports and hobbies. That is time you have that you couldn’t save twenty years ago.”
Yet the one attribute we haven’t yet grappled with is the murky arena of ethics, which is slated to be the next chapter of contention in the legal industry and how and where boundaries will be drawn when it comes to mental manipulation of our learned behaviors.
“When you spend so much time designing algorithms to make better decisions, it is because you know your weaknesses, the weaknesses of the brain,” William conjectured. “It is so innocent as clicking on an ad. That’s not the point. The point is you’re weaponizing those algorithms against the brain of the people who don’t have enough chemical energy to fight back. And that is the anxiety and depression epidemic we are living in.”
Moreover, we are stuck in the stratosphere of a double-edged sword: feeling isolated as so much of time and interaction is now done via that beeping rectangle in our palms, but at the same time we are connecting – often profoundly – with humans we would have never otherwise met in the paths in which we typically transgress.
With that, there are both pros and cons to the tech platforms and algorithms which we use to run our lives. Or is it that those algorithms are the ones using us and subsequently running our lives? How much control do we really have? When the carrot is dangled, is it your personal responsibility to know how much to nibble off?
“It’s an interesting time,” Hollie added. “I am interested to see how this conversation changes in a year.” Stay aware...
The conversation
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