Artificial Intelligence: Mankind's Last Invention
It could be terrible and it could be great. It's not clear.
Right
But one thing is for sure, we will not control it.
Go is arguably the most complex board game in existence
Its goal is simple
Surround more territory than your opponent
This game has been played by humans for the past 2,500 years
And is thought to be the oldest board game still being played today
However, it's not only humans that are playing this game now
In 2016, Google DeepMind's AlphaGo beat 18-time world champion Lee Sedol in four out of five games
Now, normally a computer beating a human at a game like chess or checkers wouldn't be that impressive
But Go is different
Go cannot be solved by brute force
Go cannot be predicted
There are over 10 to the 170 moves possible in Go
To put that into perspective
There are only 10 to the 80 atoms in the observable universe
AlphaGo was trained using data from real human Go games
It ran through millions of games and learned the techniques used and even made up new ones that no one had ever seen
and this is very impressive alone
However, what many people don't know is that only a year after AlphaGo's victory over Lee Sedol
A brand new AI called AlphaGo Zero beat the original AlphaGo
Not in four out of five games
Not in five out of five games
Not in ten out of ten games
But beat alphago 100 to zero
100 games in a row
The most impressive part?
It learned how to play with zero human interaction
This technique is more powerful than any previous version
Why?
It isn't restricted to human knowledge
No data was given. No historical figures were given
With just the bare-bones rules
AlphaGo Zero surpassed the previous AlphaGo in only 40 days of learning
In only 40 days, it surpassed over 2,500 years of strategy and knowledge
It only played against itself and is now regarded as the best Go player in the world
Even though it isn't human
But wait, if this AI learned how to play without any human interaction
Made up strategies of its own and then beat us with those strategies
Then that means there's more non-human knowledge about Go than there is human
And if we continue to develop Artificial Intelligence
Then, that means there's going to be more and more non-human intelligence
Eventually, there's going to be a point where we represent the minority of intelligence
Maybe even a very minuscule amount
That's fine though, we can just turn it off. Right?
It's a thought, but think!
When modern-day humans begin to take over the planet
Why didn't the chimps and Neanderthals turn us off?
If this artificial intelligence becomes super intelligent and learns through and is connected to the Internet
We can't just shut down the entire Internet, there's no off switch
So, what happens if we end up stuck with AI that is constantly and exponentially getting smarter than we are?
What if it gets to a point that us, humans, get in the way?
And the AI hits the off switch on humani…
When people think of AI, they tend to think of super intelligent AI
AI that serves the human race, but could also end us at a moment's notice
But is this REALLY going to happen?
Pop culture, mostly movies, tend to depict AI not as benevolent creations, but rather as robots with a malicious intent
Except for "TARS" in "Interstellar", he's pretty cool
Yeah, you can use it to find your way back in the ship after I blow you out of the airlock
There's a lot more to AI than you might think
There's a lot more types that serve different purposes
Artificial Narrow Intelligence
Also known as weak AI is the only form of Artificial Intelligence that humanity has created so far
It makes this sound kind of bad, but trust me it does a really good job at what it's supposed to do
Narrow AI is AI that was created for the sole purpose of handling one task
It's the kind of AI that AlphaGo is
Narrow AI is good at speech and image recognition
and also, at playing games like chess or Go
or even pretty complex games like “Dota 2”
At the International 2017 World Championship
OpenAI’s artificial intelligence destroyed pro player Dendi 2-0
But much like AlphaGo Zero, it wasn't taught how to play the game
It played out millions of years’ worth of 1 vs. 1 matches against itself and learned on its own
It started out barely knowing how to walk and, eventually as time went on, it surpassed human level skill
If you use Spotify, you'll see that it creates a daily mixes for you based on the music you listen to
Amazon learns from and teaches itself your buying habits to suggest you new products
but it seems an uncommon re-occurrence where these AI teach themselves how to do the task at hand
How is that even possible?
Well, through something called "Machine Learning"
"Machine Learning" is the science of trying to get computers to learn and think like we humans do
"Machine Learning" is essentially the same way that babies learn
We start off as small screaming sacks of meat, but over time we improve our learning
We take in more data and more information from observations and interactions
And most of the time we end up pretty smart
The most popular technique out there to make a computer mimic a human brain is known as a "neural network"
Our brains are pretty good at solving problems
But each neuron in your brain is only responsible for solving a very minuscule part of any problem
Think of it like an assembly line. Where each neuron in your brain has a certain job to do in order to completely solve a problem
Let's make a simple example of a neural network
In order to say that someone is alive, they have to either have a pulse or they must be breathing
But not necessarily both at the same time
This yellow dot represents a neuron in a neural network
It functions just like a neuron in your brain does
It takes in information and then gives an output
If this neuron takes in the information that says "hey this person has a pulse and is breathing"
Then the neuron deciphers this information and says "okay this person is alive"
It learns to analyze situations where the human would be declared alive
If it's breathing or has a pulse
And in situations where the human would be dead
Where neither of those is true
That's essentially a bare-bones explanation of how it works
Of course no neural network is really this simple
Many have millions of parameters and are much more complex than just this one-layer network
The world is full of sounds and visuals and just data in general
And we take in all of this to form our view of reality
However, as more and more complex topics show up with more and more data
It becomes harder and harder for humans to do this analysis on their own
This is where machine learning comes in handy
Machines can not only analyze data given to it
But also learn from it and adapt its own view of it
Let's go back to AlphaGo Zero
In only 40 days, it surpassed thousands of years of strategy and knowledge and even made up some of its own strategies
But how did it do all of this so quickly
Biological neurons in your brain operate at about 200 Hertz
That's proved to be fine for us
But modern transistors operate at over 2 gigahertz
An entire order of magnitude faster
Those neurons in your brain traveled to what are known as “axons”
And they travel at about a hundred meters per second
Which is pretty fast and gives us pretty good reaction time
But it's only about a third as fast as the speed of sound
Computers, however, can transmit information at the speed of light
or 300 million meters per second
So, there's quite a big difference between our brain’s capabilities and our computers
In just one week, a computer can do 20,000 years’ worth of human level research or simulations or anything that is trained to do
A brain has to fit inside your head
There's a limit to how much space they can take up
But a computer could fill an entire room or even an entire building
Now, obviously, weak AI doesn't require an entire server room to run
Like we saw with OpenAI it only took a USB stick
But for more intelligent AI, it may require much more power
Artificial General Intelligence or AGI is AI with more than a single purpose
AGI is almost at or equal to human level intelligence
And this is where we're trying to get to
But there's a problem
The more we search into it, the harder and harder it seems to be able to achieve
Think about how you perceive things
When someone asks you a complicated question, you have to sort through a ton of unrelated thoughts and observations
And articulate a concise response to that question
This isn't exactly the easiest thing for a computer to achieve
See, humans aren't able to process information at the speed of light like computers can, but we can plan things
We can think of smart ways to solve problems without having to brute-force through every option
Getting a computer to human level thinking is hard
We humans can create things. We invent things.
We create societies and play games and laugh
These are all very hard things to teach a computer
How can you teach a computer to create something that doesn't exist or hasn't even been thought of?
and what would be its incentive to do so?
I believe AGI or strong AI is the most important artificial intelligence to be created
And here's why: Machine learning is exponential
Meaning that it starts off rather slow
But there's a certain tipping point where things start to speed up drastically
The difference between weak AI and strong AI is millions of times larger than the difference between strong AI and super intelligent AI
Once we have the artificial general intelligence that can function like a human being
For the most part at least, it may help us reach super intelligence level in only a few months or perhaps even weeks
But here comes another big problem
See, many people tend to see intelligence on a graph like this
We have maybe an ant here, a mouse at about here, the average human here, and maybe Einstein right here just above
If you asked most people "where a super intelligent AI would lie on this graph?"
Most would probably put it somewhere around here
But this just isn't the case
Although AI might not be at human level intelligence yet, it will be one day
and it won't stop at human level
It'll most likely just zoom past and continue getting on more and more advanced until, eventually, the graph looks something like this
This is what is known as “the technological singularity”
Where artificial intelligence becomes so advanced to the point where there's an extreme explosion of new knowledge and information
Some that might not even be able to be understood by humans
If we make a super intelligent AI, that AI would be able to improve upon itself
And in turn gets smarter in a shorter amount of time
Which means that this new and improved AI could do the same thing
It continues to repeat this process doing it faster and faster each time
The first recreation may take a month
The second a week, a third a day
And this keeps going until it's billions of times smarter than all of humanity
Compared to chimps, we share about 96% of their DNA
We are 96% chimp
But in that little four percent
We went from being extremely hairy and mediocre primates
To a species that has left the planet
We're a species that plans to colonize Mars
A species that made missiles and millions of inventions
All compacted down into that four percent DNA difference
The number of genetic differences between a human and a chimp is ten times smaller than
the genetic difference between a mouse and a rat
But yet only being four percent different from them their entire fate seems to lie in our hands
If we want to, for some reason, put a McDonald's on a chimpanzee habitat
We just do it. We don't ask.
There are 5.5 quadrillion ants on the earth
Ants outnumber us 1 million to 1
and yet we actually live like they don't exist at all
If we see one crawling on our table, we just smush it and move on with our day
What happens when the day comes where AI becomes the humans in this situation, and we become the ants?
Super intelligent AI is different from software we know today
We tend to think our software is something that we program in the computer to follow our rules
But with highly advanced AI and through machine learning
The AI teaches itself how and what life is as well as how to improve it
After a while, there is no need for any human interaction
Perhaps humans would even slow it down, as opposed to speeding it up
We have to be careful about how we make it
As Sam Harris has stated
The first thing you wanna do is not give it access to the Internet, right? You just gonna cage this thing, right?
Because you don't want it to get out, right? But you want to tempt it. You want to see if it's trying to get out.
How do you know whether… it is called a honeypot strategy where you tempt it
To make certain moves in the direction of acquiring more power
For example, if we're somehow able to give a super intelligent AI orders and it follows those orders
It may just take the quickest and easiest route to solve them
Just because we make a super intelligent AI, that doesn't mean that it's going to be wise
There's a difference between intelligence and wisdom
Intelligence is more about making mistakes and acquiring knowledge and being able to solve problems through that
Wisdom, on the other hand, is about applying the correct knowledge in the most efficient way
Wisdom is being able to see beyond the intelligence gained and being able to apply that to other things
In, hopefully, a productive way
If we give AI an order to solve world hunger
The easiest way to solve world hunger is just to kill all life on the planet and then nothing would ever be hungry again
But, obviously, that isn't what we want
We would have to, somehow, teach the AI to have human like values
A moral code to follow and somehow work around that
In a way, we'd want it to be like a super intelligent human cyborg
You may not even realize it, but the majority of humans are already cyborgs
Humans are already becoming less biological and more technical
We already put our minds on non-biological things
How?
Well, many of you are watching this video on that device right now
Phones!
Your phone has become an extension of yourself
It can answer any question you could ever ask in a moment's notice
There's only one problem though
Your inputs are just too slow
If we were able to create a high bandwidth link between the brain and the internet
We would be literally connected to everyone and everything on the entire planet
This is what neural link is aiming to do
Create what is known as a “neural lace”
Your brain has two big systems
Your limbic system and your cortex
and these two are in a relationship with each other
Your limbic system is responsible for your basic emotions your survival instinct
Your cortex is responsible for your problem-solving skills - your critical thinking
“Neuralink” is aiming to create a third layer to this
The AI would be like a third wheel in this relationship
But would increase our capabilities by multiple orders of magnitude
We all would have eidetic memories - picture perfect memory
We would have access to all the information available to the world and be able to access it instantly
With the addition of this third layer
People may eventually realize that they like this new-found knowledge and way of living more than the alternative
More than living without this new-found AI that has been installed into them
Eventually, people may decide to ditch their human body, their biological self, in favor of the artificial world
This, of course, is a long ways away
But it doesn't mean we shouldn't think about it
There are, of course, many problems and counter-arguments that come up
and I'll address some of them now
For starters, how do we program something like consciousness?
We don't even know what it is yet
How do we program something like a limbic system into a machine?
Something that has a sense of fear perhaps even a fear of death
Can a machine or an AI really love someone or show that emotion?
Because if it can love it can also hate
Which could raise big problems for us in the future
This is a fear of many people when the idea of super intelligent AI is brought up
The biggest and most pressing question is
Will it be pleasant? or will it be hateful?
Could it even be either of those things in the first place?
And, more importantly, is it even necessary?
Sure, a super intelligent AI would have all the information in the world at its disposal
But, then again, so do you and I
So do all the people in the world with very radical views
Who's to say that a super intelligent AI wouldn't adopt these views as its own
And then decide to execute on those instead of what we had planned
Sure, it's possible that a super intelligent AI could improve upon itself using knowledge gained
But, then again, it isn't pulling random improvements out of thin air
It's not just going to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity with the raw mathematics
What if some of its upgrades needed experiments to be run
What if it needs more information? Is it just going to make it up?
This leads into: What if the AI learned to lie?
And then decides to lie to us about its accomplishments for its own selfish reasons
It's also possible that the progress of computing will slow down, and it looks like it already is
I mean look at airplanes
In the past 100 years, we went from this
to this
But like many things there's a threshold that is hard to get past
but if we do get past this barrier
The upsides could be tremendous
It's almost obvious that super intelligent AI has the capability of making humanity billions of times better than it is today
But on the flipside, it could also be used as a weapon
Just think, like I said before, if this thing is running for a week and has access to all of the world's information
It could make over 20,000 years of technological progress
You let this thing run for six months, and you could potentially have 500,000 years or even more of technological progress
Imagine if this got into the wrong hands and imagine the repercussions it would have
When you Google something
Not only are you giving out data and telling a potential artificial intelligence what you're thinking
You're also telling it how you're thinking
We feed it all of our questions, all of our answers
If we were going to try and program a limbic system into an AI
We would be teaching an artificial intelligence what we're afraid of
Out of all the data in the world, over 90% of it has been created in the past three years
AI learned how to recognize faces
It learned how to recognize voices
It learns languages and then will eventually translate between them all seamlessly
This knowledge and information train could continue until it has gone through all 100% of this data
This is why artificial intelligence is such an important topic
Super intelligent AI is the last invention that humanity will ever make
Once it's invented it can't be “uninvented”
The technology and developments that could possibly turn the human species into immortal godlike figures
Is coincidentally the same technology that could also cause the downfall of humanity
Many people are resistant to the AI because they fear it may have some of the negative traits that we humans do
It may be greedy. It may lie. It may be selfish. It may be rebellious. It may be short-tempered.
The power of super intelligent AI is there
Patiently waiting to be found
But the question is
Do we actually want to find it?
If we want the future to be perfect
If we want to create the perfect super intelligent AI
We need to be prepared
We need the smartest minds and the best strategies in order to create the perfect super intelligent AI
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