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Reilly 1 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 Reilly 2 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. Reilly 3 “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. Reilly 4 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 Reilly 5 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 Reilly 6 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. Reilly 7 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 Reilly 8 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 Reilly 9 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. Reilly 10 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.