I wish someone had told me how AI will cause the end of humanity

“I wish someone had told me” is a series of posts that feed into our inquisitive nature at CN&CO. Each week we hear from someone in our network about something interesting or surprising that’s recently happened or occurred to them – or lessons they learnt. These blogs are a way to pay it forward and form part of CN&CO’s belief that the world can be a better place – and we all have a responsibility to make it so. This week’s post is by Carel and his views on artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been an academic discipline since 1956 and, simply put, is intelligence as shown by machines, rather than humans. With the recent surge of interest in AI – fuelled I think largely by ChatGPT – much has been written about the pros and cons of AI. With Elon Musk and numerous other entrepreneurs calling for a halt in AI citing “risks to society”, I have been reading a little – and thinking a lot – about the future of AI. And our very existence.

Calling for a halt seems futile to me. The genie is out of the bottle as it were. And we simply are going to have to ride the tiger even if, as I suspect, we will come horribly short. And perhaps humanity as we know it will end.

Don’t get me wrong – I love technology. I fully endorse AI complementing and assisting what humans do. And we are already experiencing many benefits in all walks of life – being able to play bridge against robots in my case 🙂 Also Google, Siri, Waze, YouTube – many of the applications I use daily.

Taking away the menial so that we can focus on the more creative side of life is a massive benefit to my mind in AI. But therein lies the rub – the creative side. Language. Anyone who knows me will have heard me loudly proclaiming that the creatives (artists broadly, journalists and those who fuel the creative economy) are the ones who will save the planet. Make the world better. History has shown that creatives are the ones who moves us forward – with new ideas. With helping us to make sense of our realities. By fuelling hope. Driving passions. But if AI “takes over” that human ability – language and creativity – will machines also control our future? I think yes – and that scares me.

Toby Shapshak, in an excellent recent Financial Mail piece titled ‘Hold your AI horse’, quotes the brilliant Israeli academic and historian Yuval Noah Harari who, along with Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin (founders of the Center for Humane Technology) wrote in a recent The New York Times Opinion piece: “[Over half of the 700 academics and researchers surveyed] stated that there was a 10% or greater chance of human extinction (or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment) from future AI systems”. Shapshak continues: “They used the analogy of half the engineers who built an aircraft warning that there was a ‘10% chance the plane will crash, killing you and everyone else on it’. The question they ask is: ‘Would you still board?'”

Despte my high risk tolerance, I would seriously think not to, and to find other ways of travel. As such, should we not find other ways to do what AI is best at doing – taking away the menial? Do we really need the other “benefits” – which for me can be summarised as “more, quicker”. Is less, slower not better? Safer? And a guarantee of our humanity? Our futures?

Harari warns: “The time to reckon with AI is before our politics, our economy and our daily life become dependent on it. Democracy is a conversation; conversation relies on language, and when language itself is hacked, the conversation breaks down and democracy becomes untenable. If we wait for the chaos to ensue, it will be too late to remedy it”.

Happy thinking about AI. And happy reading, using language and supporting (enjoying!) the creative economy. While we still can 🙂