Download Reilly Hannah Reilly English 3200 Professor Clow November 24

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Hannah Reilly
English 3200
Professor Clow
November 24, 2015
Essay III
Humanity vs. Robotics
Imagine a world where we walk the earth with robots, or artificial intelligence
machines. Will we know that they are there? Will they respect us? There is an oncoming
emergence of a new and innovative technology that could change our lives forever. This
will introduce robotic type machines that we will be able to connect to and interact with.
Renowned scientist and Google’s new head futurist, Ray Kurzweil, calls the oncoming of
these machines The Singularity.
“The Singularity is a future period during which the pace of technological
change will be so fast and far-reaching that human existence on this planet will
be irreversibly altered. We will combine our brain power—the knowledge,
skills, and personality quirks that make us human—with our computer power
in order to think, reason, communicate, and create in ways we can scarcely
even contemplate today” (Kurzweil, 39).
This will be made possible by creating a computer like machine that exceeds human
intelligence. We will be able to "download" our minds into this new computer-like
technology, creating super-human robot type machines. We will be able to create
extensions of ourselves in a robot form. There is no way of knowing what will come when
this new and innovative technology emerges into our world. It seems impossible that our
world could remain the way it is today. Humans and machines will live either in harmony
or chaos. We will either coexist in harmony or become the minority of this new form of
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artificial intelligence technology we have created. There are many unintended
consequences of The Singularity and artificial intelligence that must be explored, the
impact on the environment, the human spirit, and creation of new knowledge.
Charles T Ruben defends the biological features of humans in his article about
artificial intelligence because he finds them to be necessary for our world to survive. The
bodily component is so important to who we are. Through our transitions from young to
old, we learn so much about this world and how we interact with it. If we are all turned
into machines what will become of our world? These machines wont need food, air, water,
etc. They will not respect the nature and beauty of our planet and therefore will not have
the necessary motivation to maintain the world around them "Central to the extinctionist
project of perfecting--and thus replacing--human life as we know it is not only the belief
that our bodies are nothing more than poorly designed machines, but that our identity is
something that can exist independently of our given body" (Rubin, 92). This oncoming of
machines and robots would diminish our sense of self and personal identity. It is not just
our physical bodies that he is worried about. It is our minds and emotions. It is our
creativity that makes this world we live in flourish. These machines will have no sense of
individuality or diversity. They may understand the words but they will not be able to truly
understand what it means to experience these things. They wont have any sense of self
because they are being programmed to think and act in certain ways.
In the next several decades, Singularitarians believe that we will be able to upload
our consciousness onto computers.
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“In the next 25 years, we will learn how to augment our 100 trillion very slow
interneuronal connections with highspeed virtual connections via
nanorobotics. This will allow us to greatly boost our pattern-recognition
abilities, memories, and overall thinking capacity, as well as to directly
interface with powerful forms of computer intelligence. The technology will
also provide wireless communication from one brain to another” (Kurzweil).
This will begin once engineers build the first computer with more intelligence than human
beings. The emergence of this new super-intelligent technology will spark serious
economic growth, having more impact than the Industrial Revolution. “The availability of
all that cheap, mass--produced brilliance will spark explosive economic growth, an
unending, hypersonic, technoindustrial rampage that by comparison will make the
Industrial Revolution look like a bingo game” (Zorpette). This technology will cause such a
great economic impact because there will be such easy access to intelligence and new
information. New ideas will no longer need months, years, or decades to be developed
because we will not need to search for the necessary information. These robots we are
creating will go out in search of the information that we need and find it for us rather than
humans wasting their time doing tedious tasks. The new information will just be sitting
there in a machine waiting for us to access it.
This new emerging technology will provide us with a type of virtual reality where
we can shift from the physical to a more virtual world.
"Thinking at the speed of light, manipulating matter at the atomic scale,
liberating ourselves from the constraints of body, the networked successor of
humanity will become the master of the universe. It will discover new ways
to avert its own ultimate extinction. It will recreate lost worlds and resurrect
the dead. It will close the gap between imagination and reality" (Rubin, 93).
We will be able to shift from the physical to a more virtual world, a world that promises, if
not immortality, than at least a return to paradise without ever moving our physical bodies.
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There will be no need for the physical world around us. The potential unintended
consequence of this future is the complete destruction of most of the plant and animal
species on this planet. If we no longer need to eat and breathe, why do we need a healthy
planet? Do we have the right to create something that could potentially destroy every other
living creature? We will ultimately be able to build our own individual worlds exactly the
way we want them to be. With this new possibility comes many things that we will no long
need to be concerned with. “With your consciousness able to go from mechanical body to
mechanical body, or virtual paradise to virtual paradise, you’ll never need to face death,
illness, bad food, or poor cellphone reception”(Zorpette). We will no longer be concerned
with our physical bodies or world. If we are caught up in our virtual realities twenty-fourseven, we will no longer have to think about the bad things in our world. We will be able to
change the things that are “going on around us” in this virtual reality we have created. We
will never have to encounter an illness or anything that we do not like because we will
never be physically leaving our home, or wherever we step into this new virtual reality we
have created.
Experts say that there is a possibility that artificial intelligence will overtake human
intelligence in the next sixteen years. Some think that in the future we will be able to
transform beyond our physical limitation with the assistance of this emerging technology.
Others believe that we will give up our human abilities and eventually become consumed
by artificial intelligence- based organisms. "And others worry that we're barreling toward
a future that doesn't take people into account. For instance, self-driving cars could improve
safety, but also put millions of truck drivers out of work, Hibbard said. So far, no one is
planning for those possibilities" (Ghose). The consensus view of AI scientists is moving
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closer to the ideas of Kurzweil. AI is still far behind the average 7-year-old in common
sense, vision, language, and intuition about the way that the physical world works. A
machine will not be able to determine that flipping over a cup will cause a puddle just by
watching a person do it. The machine would need to create an exact simulation with the
correct measurements in order to come to a conclusion. Some scientists believe we are
moving towards a future that does not account for humans. "Since Gutenberg invented the
printing press, humans have continuously redefined intelligence and transferred those
tasks to machines. Now, even tasks considered at the core of humanity, such as caring for
the elderly or the sick, are being outsourced to empathetic robots" (Ghose). Humans are
already giving away so many intelligence tasks, like writing, navigating, memorizing, math
calculations, etc. Eventually we will give up all that makes us human to these machines we
have created leaving no use for us in our own world.
Robots are taking over high-skill jobs where employees would earn a high wage.
“‘There’s no question that in some high-profile industries, technology is displacing workers
of all, or almost all, kinds,’ wrote Paul Krugman in the New York Times” (Grobart). High
unemployment rates in the US and Europe are partly due to robots taking over these jobs.
Robots are now able to complete tasks that would normally take a whole team of people
hours to finish. As the emergence of artificial intelligence progresses, corporations will be
able to expand production quickly and efficiently. Although as we head towards this time
of machine-based labor, human labor will decrease as well as wages. Humans are
becoming much less in demand because there are robots that are just as capable and skilled
as humans but cost less to employ. “The ratio of jobs created to jobs eliminated by robots
and where all the newfound wealth ultimately winds up are entirely dependent on how
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workers, businesses, and policymakers prepare for this new era” (Grobart). The robotic
revolution does not need to destroy our world. With the right people behind this new
technology, it can create jobs rather than eliminate them. There are still tasks that robots
cannot perform and therefore humans are still necessary in the workforce. “This is the
state of the robotic arts today: a point where humans and robots share labor, with robots
handling the simple and repetitive and humans taking care of the complex and dynamic”
(Grobart). As of now, humans and robots work together in harmony. But will this last as
they robots begin to develop more human-like qualities?
Professor Nick Bostrom believes that the emergence of super intelligence could put
the human race at risk. He wants to prepare for this technology and make it safe before it
gets built. “The assumption is that intelligence is more powerful than anything else, and
that human intellect can never compete with a superintelligence — an entity that might be
to us like we are to a rabbit. Or an ant” (Lewan). Intelligence is the most powerful thing in
the world. Humanity will not be able to keep up with this new AI when it emerges. Danica
Kragic Jensfelt, professor in robotics and computer science at the Royal Institute of
Technology thinks that it will be difficult for humans to accept merging with new
technologies because we will no longer know what humanity is. These technological
advances are growing too fast for humanity to adapt to it. Once machines reach the
intelligence of humans, we will no longer be able to push ourselves further. Machines will
ultimately replace us. “an intelligence explosion might lead to entities that are not at all
interested in humans, and might not consider us important to preserve”(Lewan). This new
technology that we are creating might in the end have no interest in our race. They will
have no need or desire to keep us around.
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There is no way to determine what will become of our world when these machines
take over. Will we really be able to trust these machines to take care of us and respect us?
Will they not ultimately end up being more intelligent that we are and no longer require
our assistance? So what happens when they no longer need us mere mortal humans
around? How will we be able to survive in this new world without the guidance of these
machines we have created?
"However attractive the world of artificial life might seem (at least to the
scientists who envision it), we have no reason to believe that we can really
understand the beings who would live there….once humanity is overcome, all
bets are off and any thing we might say about the post-biological future is
merely a projection of our own biological nature"(Rubin, 95,96).
Once we have taught these super-human machines everything that we know, they will no
longer need us around. This will lead us to either become extinct or enslaved to these new
super-human machines that we have created. The human race is destined to become the
minority of these artificial intelligence machines, along with the physical world that we all
know and cherish. There is no way to truly understand how these machines will act and
treat the mere humans that came before them. They will no longer require the physical
world that we left behind and will not respect the beauty of nature. Our world is destined
for failure when and if these artificial intelligence machines take over.
If these machines are anything like Ava in the movie Ex Machina, then the human
race truly is destined for death. We would have no way of knowing whether the people we
meet are humans or machines. These machines would have no sense of morality or
empathy causing them to disregard human feelings. They would also have no regard for
the humans’ necessities to survive. In the end of the movie, Ava leaves Caleb locked in the
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building. She doesn’t give him any food or water and basically left him for dead. She does
this after manipulating him from the first day she met him. The only thing that she ever
wanted from him was to be let out of the building. And in the end she leaves him locked
inside, just as she was. One line that stood out to me in the move was, “These new
machines will look at us like we look at fossils” (Ex Machina). These machines that we want
to create will look at us as we look at fossils. A part of our past, something that we have
learned from but not longer find useful. The question will always remain of whether these
artificial intelligence machines will be able to exist in harmony with human beings.
There are academic gatherings to discuss this topic, but there is too much fixation
on death avoidance for this to be a real debate. There are also many credible articles on the
coming of artificial intelligence. There is not enough research and facts to back up what
they are saying. “We all know it’s wrong. We can sense it in the gaping, take-my-word-forit extrapolations and the specious reasoning of those who subscribe to this form of the
singularity argument. Then, too, there’s the flawed grasp of neuroscience, human
physiology, and philosophy. Most of all, we note the willingness of these people to predict
fabulous technological advances in a period so conveniently short it offers themselves hope
of life everlasting” (Zorpette). Glen Zorpette believes that Kurzweil’s timeline of this new
technology emerging is incorrect. He thinks that it will take much longer than expected.
Kurzweil’s view that, “some of us alive today will live indefinitely” in incorrect in Zorpette's
view. Kurzweil is just trying to entice people into supporting and believing in his vision, in
Zorpette’s view.
In the end, when these new artificial intelligence machines emerge the world as we
know it will be over. There is no way of really knowing what will become of humanity and
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our physical world because there is no way of knowing what these machines will actually
be like until they are really here. There are many unintended consequences that artificial
intelligence will have on humanity and as well as the world us mere humans have come to
love and know so well. If history has taught us anything, it is that once we have gotten
everything that we can out of something, we toss it to the side and find the next thing,
never to think about it again. So who is to say that these machines will not be exactly the
same? Once they get all the useful information that they can out of us, they will just leave
us to fend for ourselves in this new and different world that they have created.
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Works Cited
Ex Machina. Dir. Alex Garland. Perf. Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac, and Domhnall Gleeson.
Universal Studios, 2015. DVD.
Ghose, By Tia. "Intelligent Robots Will Overtake Humans by 2100, Experts Say." LiveScience.
TechMedia Network, 07 May 2013. Web. 03 Nov. 2015.
Grobart, Sam. "Robot Workers: Coexistence Is Possible." Bloomberg.com. Bloomberg, 13
Dec. 2012. Web. 15 Nov. 2015.
Kurzweil, Ray. "The Future of Machine–Human Intelligence." Furturist. Mar. 2006: 39-48.
26 Oct. 2015.Print
Lewan, Mats. "Here Is How We Could Coexist with a Superintelligence." Mats Lewan The
Biggest Shift Ever. World Press, 03 Nov. 2014. Web. 29 Oct. 2015.
Rubin, Charles T. "Artificial Intelligence and Human Nature." The New Atlantis. (2003): 88100. 25 Oct. 2015.Print.
Zorpette, Glen. "Waiting for the Rapture." Http://spectrum.ieee.org/. IEEE Spectrum, 30
May 2008. Web. 26 Oct. 2015.