10 Things You Should Know About Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity
We’re doing pretty well, us humans. As a species, we’ve been around for a good 200,000 years, surviving – if not evading – the full monty of general disasters ranging from volcanic eruptions to catastrophic comets – KT extinction events of the sort that ultimately did it in for the dinosaurs.
We’re also really rather creative as a species (putting the sapiens into homo sapiens if you like). Credit where credit’s due, in fact, for us not having invented anything yet that has the destructive
power to eradicate our species from the face of this earth. And I even count nuclear weapons within this bracket, as – needing notoriously rare raw materials such as plutonium and lots of space – nuclear facilities tend to be both costly and really rather difficult to hide, meaning few groups have them.
But creativity brings risk, and just because we haven’t discovered something that poses an existential threat to us yet doesn’t mean it’s not on the horizon. What might such a threat look like? Genetic modification technology for humans? A tool that enables global totalitarianism? Molecular nanotechnology? Something that could biochemically wipes us out, or – indeed central to all of these things – machine technology?
Falling short of a freak, insurance-proof asteroid strike, if anything poses an existential threat in the next 100 years, probably going to be technological. In fact, as we accelerate the growth of our artificial intelligence, we’re also seeing a growing number of experts who reflect this fear. Here are 10 things you should know about what any such threat might look like:
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