Artificial Intelligence Solves the 21st Century’s Largest Challenges, but Creates Even Bigger Ones

While physiological constraints limit the growth of the biological brain, artificial intelligence (AI) “brains” are growing exponentially, to the point of exceeding human intelligence within the next 100 years. This has created untold opportunities to solve many of the 21st century’s biggest challenges. In the short term, for example, AI vehicles will drastically reduce road accidents via robotic communication. Further into the future, AI will hold the solutions to climate change, poverty, and human disease. But how?

Currently, solving those problems requires millions of scientists collaborating and communicating via a relatively inefficient process of academic publication. Compare this to the AI thought process. AI systems will be able to read the entire history of scientific literature within minutes, making rational calculations based on billions of pages of evidence. No single person or research team can synthesize that enormity of information, and they therefore cannot compare to the power of AI in scientific intervention. Science makes the seemingly impossible become possible, and that has traditionally been the result of human intelligence. AI is exciting because it magnifies that human intelligence to the point of innovating in ways we have only ever fictionalised. This could theoretically be anything, from time travel to teleportation.

At the same time however, the natural world is vulnerable to the power of AI. Consider this: an AI machine is given the task of solving climate change. Within seconds, it has scanned every scientific paper, United Nations convention, and political decision involving climate change over the last 50 years. It figures that humans combust fossil fuels in cars, factories and electricity production. It learns that this causes rising levels of CO2, which has heat-trapping abilities, adding layers of warmth to the atmosphere and causing global warming. Objectively, human activity is the root cause of climate change, and the rational computed decision is to eradicate human existence. Although a viable solution, the results would be disastrous. Political measures must therefore be taken to ensure humans and robots work in symbiosis rather than mutual destruction. AI scientists must programme rules to eliminate negative scenarios, such that computed decisions avoid all destructive consequences.

Another solution to AI-induced disaster may be to create human-computer hybrids that understand the effects of its decisions from an emotional perspective. Humans and computers are classically thought of as separate entities, and there is often conjecture over whether advanced computers will be our friends or enemies. However, AI makes it possible to combine the two into one tightly-coupled cognitive unit. This would result in human brains with infallible memories, which could download skills or even be hacked. A human-AI cyborg would be smarter than either human or computer alone, because it can combine empathy with raw logic to consider the emotional impact of high-order decisions and avoid disaster.

AI is exciting because it carries the potential to solve many of today’s largest problems. However, AI technology will conceive new problems we never thought imaginable, and such problems must be prevented through political and scientific intervention.