AI (Artificial intelligence) and AGI (Artificial general intelligence)

By: Nafisa Siddiqui
Just plug it in and hit the key
And let the old brain rest
We do our race through cyberspace
And compose the digital thunder
Just how technology does for the soul Causes me to wonder
(John Calhoun Merril)
The poetry above by John Calhoun gives us a moment of thought, it is true that just plugging in, hitting the key, and getting the work done by AI without using your own brain cells means resting your brain which means rusting your own brain. We all know that brain cells operate under this principle. Use it, or lose it. If our brains are not used to communicating with each other, these cells lose their function.
The new technology is creeping into our day-to-day existence without giving us a chance to figure out what it is. Is it good or is it invading our privacy and how harmful for our well-being and for our society’s culture and ethics? Usually, you get a message or a command letting you know need to update your software. After update You find some new app pop up without your permission. Most of the time you don’t even know how to use it and learn that new app by instructions provided by app developers.
Geoffrey Hinton godfather of AI and a famous award-winning computer scientist retired from Google. His reason for retirement was his concern that AI technology is going out of control and this rapid development is a danger for humans, this triggered a violent emotional agitation in the tech world. Further, his claim that AI will be misused for political gain, he confessed he regrets some of his contributions to artificial intelligence.
In a conference in 2014, Hinton said that he has changed his mind about how AI technology works. He now believes that AI systems can be much more intelligent than humans and are better learners. “Things like GPT.4 know much more than we do”.
Furthermore, he referred to the latest iteration of research lab OpenAI’s large language model. “They have sort of common sense knowledge about everything.”The more this technology learns about humans, the better it will get at manipulating humans, he said and then he further added that risks of AI technology and its misuse by criminals and other wrongdoers — particularly those who would use it for harmful political ends — can become a danger to society”-
Ex-Google engineer Blake
Lemoine
Also claimed that vendor’s AI chat boat LaMDA can hold spontaneous conversation and have human feelings. These are the statements given by the tech wizards who contributed to developing AI.
One thing is very clear with all those statements of tech experts that all these new technological innovations need checkpoints and regulations otherwise it will be very risky. Especially generative AI which had a self learning system. And it’s very clear now that unregulated and unrestrained generative AI systems lead the society towards disaster in the hands of people with unscrupulous political intentions or criminals and hackers. The bad actors could use generative AI for fraud or even to try to trigger terrorist attacks.
This is our one worry that AGI-4 technology will make humans obsolete and another loss, a bigger one will happen when we outsource our decision making to algorithmic systems which we hardly understand.
The human use of AI covers everything humans can imagine could be automated and made more efficiently evil with AI.
Green, director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, said it’s helpful to frame AI risks as those that come from the AI itself and risks that come from the use of AI. He further said :
“Everything horrible that human intelligence can do, artificial intelligence might be programmed to do as well as or better than humans”. Green also said “There are vastly more chances that humans might use AI for existentially risky purposes than there are chances that AI would just pursue these goals on its own.”
If we see the history of humans, there are always moments we call those moments turning points and right now we are facing another such moment, the rise of the coming wave of technology (ie. advanced AI and Biotechnology).
We can see from the rapid developments of these technologies we have to face this with a choice between a future of unparalleled possibilities or a future of unimaginable peril.
The fate of humanity is to keep balance the decisions we make now will shape the future, whether we rise to the challenges to these technologies or fall victim to their dangers.
Both technologies possess potential benefits.
With AI, humans can unlock the secrets of the universe, cure diseases, and create new forms of art culture that have no boundaries, no bounds of imagination.
With Biotechnology we can engineer life to fight disease and transform agriculture.
That is one side of the story. On the other hand, with AI and AGI the technocrats are creating a system that in the long run is going to be beyond our control.
My main concern is human tracking devices. This is the right time to think and raise your voices to the tech tycoons to take serious action to control AI before it gets out of hand.
I end my article with a paragraph from Patrick M. Wood’s book “The Hard Road To World Order”.
“In the smart cities of tomorrow, people will indeed be living in a fishbowl: tracked, monitored, analyzed, nudged, limited, and directed. They will be told what to think, how to think, when to think, and how they are allowed to speak.
Non-conformists will be conformed or shunned. Trouble makers will simply be excluded altogether”.
References
Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order….