Analysis: Could AI Spell The End Of Humans?

Could AI Spell the End of Humans?

What if I told you that according to experts, the greatest threat to our survival as a species, was something entirely in our control? And knowing this information, is being planned to become integrated more and more with more critical tasks. That’s the state of artificial intelligence(AI) at the moment. AI is defined as ”the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.” AI has the capability to learn and adapt to different experiences exactly as humans do. And Although technology companies know their limits, AI poses a major threat to humans because
It’s used in our phones, social media, cars, online shopping, and everything in between. You probably know what Siri is, Apple’s digital assistant. Siri is also a form of AI, she “uses machine-learning technology to get smarter and better able to predict and understand our natural-language questions and requests” (Adams). Considering this, and how iPhones are currently the most popular phone in the world with 700 million units currently in use (near a tenth of the world’s population to put it in perspective), that’s a lot of use of AI per day just from a phone. A more complex and advanced form of AI is used in Teslas to power their “predictive capabilities, self-driving features” (Adams). They’re not exactly common yet, by 2023 it’s estimated there will be 3 million Teslas in use daily. The AI powering Teslas is so advanced, it has every major car company racing to catch up with it (and in some cases, unsuccessfully doing so). And indisputably the most popular use of AI with 2 billion uses, Facebook. They “Use ai to recognize faces [...] Facebook discusses the use of artificial neural networks - algorithms that mimic the structure of the human brain - to power facial recognition software” (Narula). Although the use of this is fairly harmless (that being just to recognize faces), the idea of it is what’s scary. It mimics the structure of the human brain. We has humans don’t even know how our own brain works,
Artificial intelligence today is in its infancy. Today, it is classified as “narrow ai, in that it is designed to perform a narrow task (facial recognition, internet searches, or driving cars)” (Tegmark). Looking at this information, AI is used for nothing more than miniscule tasks that are insignificant in the grand scheme of things. What these people don’t consider is how today we are constantly looking towards the future. Electric cars are on the rise because fossil fuels will run out, natural and renewable energy is becoming more popular to decrease global warming, and we’re looking to colonize new planets, because we know this one won’t last. We’re looking towards the future on so many things, and we should with AI as well. We need to limit its capabilities and know when to stop advancing it. Or else that future we’re working towards with electric cars, renewable energy and being an interstellar species, will never