Why humanity needs artificial intelligence to survive
Humans have always been tool users. If you’ve ever watched the science fiction classic Odyssey 2001, you’ve seen the part where the ape figures out how to use the bone as a weapon. Not a very auspicious start for what would become humanity, but it was a tool. It may also be that the first time a bone or stick was used as a tool was to scrape honey from a beehive. We’ll never really know.
The point is, we are tool creators. Humans communicate in order to survive. We form groups, we communicate and we use tools to augment us physically. Up until now, pretty much every tool we’ve ever created has been to augment our physical selves. Now we are creating tools to augment our cognitive selves. This is as radical a shift for humanity as the very first stick we used as a tool.
And Artificial Intelligence (and the various disciplines and tools that make up AI) may be as important to our future survival as those first sticks we used as tools.
Our world is becoming so complex that the systems we’ve developed to organize our societies and economies have become too complicated for our brains to comprehend. Distrust of these systems is growing. We also face the fact that we’ve messed up the environmental systems of our planet. No one brain can solve that dilemma.
Artificial Intelligence can help us do that. AI won’t solve the complexity issues we face today, but it can certainly work as a tool that can help us understand complex systems better and support our decision making. AI tools won’t work alone, they’ll have to be combined with other technologies such as blockchain to implement and track solutions.
While AI is critical to humanity’s survival, we must also be very aware of the risks and manage AI and most emerging technologies like we’ve never done before. AI can be incredibly dangerous in the hands of a state actor with no ethical qualms. Or rogue developers and hackers. All technologies are a double-edged sword.
If we take the right approach and help those who make pubic policy and develop our rule of law, we can benefit hugely from AI as a tool to augment humanity and potentially help save us in a time of growing complexity and increasing entropy from our systems.
