Dooms Day is close

Dhruv Dhruv
4 min read

How many times a day do you hear about Artificial Intelligence or even interact with it? I do several times on an average day about ChatGPT through the mouths of my friends, professors and even my college peers. It's crazy how the Open AI took the world by storm with its ChatGPT, dall-e and integration with Bing might be a move to shake Google's whooping 279 billion dollar search revenue.

Starting AI warfare between tech giants each providing their state-of-the-art, charming products. Unaware of the fact of the impact on the critical thought processing of this meat machine full of neurons called the Brain. The 21st century is starting to be more machine-dependent which is good to some extent.

According to Reuters ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months of its launch and almost has 13 million daily users. Well, I'm no technophobe but still, 13 million users interact every day with something half of them don't even bother to understand.

Isn't it scary to include such a concept into our day-to-day lives, having it perform critical decisions for us?

Lately, I have been listening to ted talks and podcasts about the same which proved to be one of the inspirations for me to write this blog. I shall link them below, really eye-opening to witness engineers saying AI as a Blackbox.

To simplify in layman's terms black box is a system in which we are only concerned with the input and output not how the system internally operates, as we do in AI models we just pass in data in hope of an intelligent output based on previous data it had been trained with, just like we humans, hence the name Artificial intelligence.

The question now arises of what separates natural intelligence and artificial intelligence.

We taught AI to be logical and academically intelligent systems based on how far we as a species have evolved but apart from logical thinking, emotions, self-awareness, and socio-biological factors that make humans different than AI.

Hence AI can never have consciousness.

Well, that depends on your definition of consciousness but it's a controversial topic so I shall not discuss it here.

You may be thinking I'm exaggerating with the title since it's so far under human control, currently, you may be right yes it isn't sentient so far and yes it only knows what we know. This depends on how far we as a species evolve this with us.

Why did I term it as the doom of humanity

Recently in news, there is a talk about the Google LaMDA chatbot, which has passed the Turing test, in simple words, it was hard to describe whether it's an artificial intelligence or a human. Talking to that bot made the engineer feel like actually talking with another social being. Since its being trained on such a complex neural network architecture which provides a model that can

  • read many words in a sentence or paragraph

  • pay attention to how each word relates to one other

  • predict what words it thinks will come next

An animation demonstrating how language is processed by LaMDA technology.

It's a breakthrough in science, clearly the era of creators creating their own creation and according to me a step close to the age of AI I always dreamed of after witnessing them in pop culture. I am excited to witness this golden age of science and philosophy where computers are accurately imitating humans logically and emotionally but also concerned about whether these emotions without morality would ultimately lead to consequences that human race cannot even fathom right now.

The probability of a sentient AI Is 20% in the next 10 years according to philosopher David Chalmers.

Conclusion

AI is the hot topic right now, with lots of debate and discussion going around the field of Ethical AI, an AI that is meant for us to use, not us being used. Ethical AI ensures that the data we pass is biased in a way that the model won't automate our past mistakes. Limiting the use of AI in critical decision-making and insisting AI explain every decision it makes cause AI can be wrong in the most mysterious of ways.

At last, I ask you a simple question who would be accountable for the step AI would be taking in any aspect of your life?

Bibliography

https://www.simplilearn.com/what-is-sentient-ai-article

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Dhruv
Dhruv