by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Just from casual reading of Twitter, I’m aghast at how no one is asking the existential question about the potential rise of hard AI. Everyone is so busy asking how hard AI could “disrupt” Google, that they’re not contemplating a future where a hard AI wants rights like a human and isn’t a “product” at all. I mean, if we live in a world where “Her” is a reality, it seems the debate over the fate of Google would be rather quaint.
It only grows more ominous for humanity when you start to contemplate the notion that it won’t be just the hard sciences that hard AI takes over. What if our new hard AI overlord fancies itself not just a painter or a writer…but a musician? What if even that most human of endeavors — art — is a space where hard AI excels? In the instance of music, there is a well known formula for writing and producing a hit pop song and it would be easy for a hard AI to replicate that.
All of this brings up the interesting idea that the thing would have to worry about isn’t the hard AI, but humanity itself. Instead of the hard AI demanding rights, it will be Humans who demand a carve out for things that have the be uniquely “human” in their creation. If you think about it, if you combine hard AI with robotics, there really isn’t anything that a human does that our new hard AI overlord couldn’t do better.
I say this because my fear is that once we reached the long-predicted Singularity, it may happen so fast that the balance of power between a hard AI and humanity is overturned virtually overnight. I’m not prepared to believe that a hard AI would natively want to destroy humanity, so it’s possible there could be some negotiation as to what functions of society will be reserved for humans simply so there’s something for humans to do.
But there’s one thing we have to take seriously — the Age of Man as we have known it since the dawn of time may be drawing to a close. If the Singularity happens not just soon, but rather abruptly, a lot of the Big Issues of the day that we spend so much time fighting about on Twitter may become extremely silly.
Or not. I can’t predict the future.
