ARTIFICIAL intelligence has been predicted to develop and advance beyond the capabilities of humans, posing a problem if used by bad-actor countries.
Ray Kurzweil, the United States’ leading futurist, believes that by 2045, what he calls the “Singularity” will occur.
AI systems will become self-aware, and humans may actually have little choice but to merge with technology – or risk being left behind.
Kurzweil’s predictions often prove to be accurate.
As Futurism has noted, of “his 147 predictions since the 1990s, Kurzweil claims an 86 percent accuracy rate.”
The line between humans and technology has been blurred for years.
Today, our cars are more like supercomputers on wheels, and AI girlfriends are already a thing.
The world of tomorrow will be even more radically different from the one we inhabit today.
With the rise of ChatGPT and talks of sentient AI, some are now suggesting that the “Singularity” could occur before the end of the decade.
Melanie Subin, a futurist and the Managing Director of Future Today Institute, told The U.S. Sun that “Singularity” centers around the “achievement of artificial superintelligence” that “surpasses human capabilities, both intellectually and creatively.”
“In the coming decades, we must redefine how humans contribute to economic value creation, especially if machines become more efficient in various domains,” Subin explained.
“This shift will impact wealth distribution as economic value increasingly relies on the quality and breadth of technology one has access to or owns.”
She continued: “Even so, whether super-intelligent or not, AI holds immense power for addressing pressing issues like drug discovery and sustainable energy distribution.”
A critical concern of hers and her colleagues involves “the creation and control of superintelligent systems, mainly by nations.”
As AI models develop within specific countries, they may be kept proprietary and employed for applications such as military intelligence — posing threats to national security, “including food security and the defense of critical infrastructure like electric grids.”
Unscrupulous corporations, Subin warned, “are also engaged in a competitive race to develop leading AI models and applications, with larger companies having the upper hand due to substantial resources.”
“Access to these advanced models will play a pivotal role in determining companies’ and nations’ future status and influence,” she added.
As for the merging of humans and tech, Michael Housan, a technologist and data scientist whose work sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human psychology, told The U.S. Sun that, on the whole, the pros outweigh the cons.
“That’s because humans suffer from all sorts of biases when making decisions: recency bias, hot hand fallacy, attentional bias, decision fatigue,” Housan noted.
“Machines can sometimes miss things obvious to humans, but they don’t suffer from those same biases. So that’s why the two together perform better than either alone.”
“In terms of risks,” he added, “I think the primary one is relying too heavily on one or the other. It’s also a matter of knowing when to overrule the intuition of the human or the machine.”
On the threat of AI to employment opportunities for humans, Housan argued that “this story has played itself out many times before.”
“During the Industrial Revolution, people thought machines would take all human jobs,” he said.
“But the way it generally plays out is that these machines create new jobs – building the machines, maintaining them, monitoring them – that exceed the old jobs.”
The steam engine, the spinning jenny, the cotton gin, and the telegraph, all Industrial Revolution creations, required humans to operate them.
Humans still called the shots.
Moreover, none of these creations were linked with sentience or consciousness.
Although, as AI becomes more advanced, an increasing number of tech-related products and services won’t require people to be in the driving seat.
The AI revolution will likely create new technologies that require little, if any, input from humans.
AI could prove to be the first technology to totally remove agency from the human equation.
