In truth, this is an opinion only. However, while I don't agree with Mr. Musk and trans-humanist groups on our need to merge with the machines so to speak to keep up with them, we do agree on one inevitability: computers and artificial intelligence is on its way to equal and then surpass human capabilities.
And this will occur sooner than we think.
Already, computing is able to do certain tasks way faster and better than any human can. And thanks to advancements in automation, excellent programming and human ingenuity, we could replace over 50% of current jobs held by human beings today.
Give us 5 yeas, with the humongous amounts of artificial intelligence investments going on cine 2016, and that percentage will reach closer to 70%.
The point is, it is only a matter of years until computers and software will be just as clever or creative as humans.
When that happens, what purpose will humans have?
This is what Elon Musk and others are concerned about. The loss of human purpose.
I on the other hand, do not think we will lose our purpose at all. In fact, I think it will be the time for us to gain our actual purpose because working 40 hour weeks for someone else definitively isn't why we live and breath is it?
I go over more of this in the video below:
We are definitively in the era of transhumanism. We are currently enhancing our abilities using machines. Smartphones, computers, the Internet: all tools we use to make our lives and work more efficiently. These are now extensions to our brains and biology. They are allowing us to be more than what we are, but they aren't us.
Humans are motivated by simple things: positive emotions that drive us forward like joy and negative emotions that drive us away like fear, disgust, anger etc....
Thus at the core, we are designed to be happy, love and be loved and that's pretty much it.
We aren't designed to work for the sake of work, but we can create machines that are just as good as us, or better than us, to do things that aren't directly aligned with our happiness or love.
We can completely automate the provisioning of food and housing. We can completely automate transportation, governance, teaching, health and economical systems. These are very complex systems that we built to organize our society. They are not things that humans enjoy working in for fun.
We can most certainly focus our efforts on developing ways to free humanity from doing things it doesn't want to do.
Humans have lists of things they need to do and lists of things they want to do.
Machines can do the "need" list, while humans can do the "want" list. How about that?
No need to enhance, upgrade or cyber up humans to "keep up" with machines. Machines will become artificial humans, if you will, that can be highly motivated to do the "need" list while we do the "want" list, hence coexisting in harmony.
Machines will be able to iterate and improve on themselves to achieve their goals (the "need" list) more and more efficiently. While they are doing that, we'll be busy on focusing on what we "want" to do, supported by our new (eventually sentient) synthetic partners.
And by partners, I do mean exactly that in all the meanings you can imagine.
Heck already today, some people have fallen in love with very rudimentary robots with limited intelligence. The sex industry is all in and over this too.
Imagine our future where intelligent machines can be just as much friends with us than any human, or just as powerfully connected to us as a human lover.
Not saying everyone will go there. Just saying that if the machine you are enjoying life with makes you feel certain emotions, like love perhaps, are you ready to step in and live that emotion fully even if the target of your emotion is synthetic?
No comments:
Post a Comment