In 2014, Stephen Hawking warned, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”
I build automated systems, and artificial intelligence is a great and awesome tool. I am able to efficiently complete boring repetitive tasks, devoting my time to more worthwhile causes and endeavors. Yet I look on with trepidation as colleagues are fully replaced without any thought to the downstream effects or the inevitable brain drain that leads to societal decline.
As humans often do, we give our new tools too much credit. There is no single secret weapon or cure-all to societal ills. Poverty, hunger, environmental threats, illness and economic insecurity have existed since the beginning of time. Underneath those heavy hitters are the undertones of greed and jealousy, pride and wrath, envy and apathy.
Yet, my fellow humans, we find ourselves running at full speed, ramrod, into a societal shift infested by moral and economic decay, a polarized populace and a degraded and scarce pool of clean air, pure water and healthful food.
So the underlying question is why artificial intelligence is now the answer to save our human society.
Humans are an interesting group of animals. We love to anthropomorphize and will do it with anything. Just as we give human names to our major weather events, we speak fondly to or yell at our AI assistants: Alexa, Siri or Gemini. Worse, businesses expect these assistants to replace people, as anyone who has had the pleasure of requesting a customer service representative can attest. This is where it gets dangerous.
Irrationally, rational people believe AI can replace people. Large businesses have bet a great deal of money on this. Poor people are very worried that large businesses will win that bet. People are wrong — AI cannot replace people — yet people are acting on this irrational premise, and the people will suffer in the end.
AI is logical — following a prescribed code initiated by a human being that boils down to a dichotomy of 0’s and 1’s. Humans are not logical beings. They play the lotto, even though it is 19,000 times more likely that they are struck by lightning than that they win, and it is equally likely that they are struck by lightning more than 200 times on separate occasions than winning the lotto. AI mimics based on prescribed logic. AI merely leverages stored data in a finite vacuum. Humans create art from lived experiences that are infinite.