Artificial intelligence is now involved more than ever in our everyday lives. Learning to live with the constant and rapid expansion of AI is a learning curve for everyone, but where will the expansion stop? Now that there are programs online of AI for everything from helping generate writing, creating photos, and creating ads, where does it end and how will this affect the human race in the future?
The dangers of AI and its rapid growth all come down to whether it is conscious or not. Since AI algorithms are constantly advancing, can AI become too powerful and pose a threat to human society? Being able to improve itself without human intervention is a scary thought and something we should be worried about because if we cannot control the rapid development of AI, we can be in harm’s way.
“The idea that this stuff could get smarter than people… I thought it was way off…. I no longer think that” Geoffrey Hinton, one of Google’s top artificial intelligence scientists, also known as “the godfather of AI,” said after he quit his job in April so that he could warn about the dangers of this technology.
To put the rapid growth of AI into perspective other social media platforms take many years to reach 100 million users on the app. For Chat GPT, the most famous AI service on the internet, it only took 2 months. Here’s a chart constructed by NapSaga to illustrate this growth. As we can see the only thing that is relatively close to Chat GPT is TikTok, where they turned around 100 million users in 9 months. But still, this is ridiculous growth and the fact that this AI service is constantly growing and adapting itself with no human intervention is scary.
Here’s the issue, once AI can improve itself, there is no way to control what it is going to do or what it is capable of doing. Being able to interact on the internet and with virtual reality can affect us in a good but bad way because there is no limit to it.
Philosopher Nick Brostrom says about this idea, “We won’t be able to control them because anything we think of, they will have already thought of, a million times faster than us. Any defenses we’ve built in will be undone like Gulliver throwing off the tiny strands the Lilliputians used to try and restrain him.”
