A symbiosis of human & artificial intelligence?
A Guest Post by Dr. Louis Rosenberg. Read the entire article at D/Sruption: The Rise of the Human Hive Mind
The dominance of humanity may soon be challenged. That’s because an alien intelligence is heading towards us at breakneck speeds. Many experts believe it will arrive within the next 50 years while others think it will get here in 20. Either way, it will not show up in a rocket ship but will be born right here on Earth, in a research lab.
I’m talking about the first sentient AI.
It will be as different from us as any alien we can imagine and we have no reason believe its interests will be even remotely aligned with our own. This intelligence will be flexible and cunning, able to infiltrate our computer networks and permeate our critical infrastructure. Upon first contact, it might appear harmless, childlike even. But it will quickly become smarter than we are and when that happens, humans will struggle to understand how it thinks, feels or acts. But it will understand us completely. After all, we will have told it everything we know and it will have spent decades studying human actions and reactions. And if that sounds incredibly dangerous, that’s because it is.
Coming together
Can we harness the vast potential of AI while at the same time preventing any unforeseen consequences from being unleashed on the world? Maybe we can and maybe we can’t, although humanity has a poor track record for keeping dangerous technologies in check. Do we even need to worry, since if we invent such an alien intelligence, surely it will exist to make our lives better? While that’s possible, it’s equally likely that it will pursue its own interests, just as humans vigorously dominated Earth’s other species and exploited its resources. So if we can’t stop this alien intelligence from arriving and we can’t count on it to be friendly, how can we protect ourselves from being intellectually outmatched by our own creation?
A good place to look is Mother Nature, where many species have evolved ingenious methods of jointly amplifying their intellects to levels well beyond the capacity of any single individual. Evolution has enabled these species to ‘think as one’, combining the knowledge, wisdom, intuition and instincts of large groups into closedloop systems that are smarter together than any of the individuals could ever be alone. Biologists call this process ‘swarm intelligence’. It’s a primary reason why birds flock, fish school and bees swarm.
Read more at D/SRUPTION: The Rise of the Human Hive Mind by Dr. Rosenberg
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