Humanity is Over?
Terrifying thought of the day
This morning I woke up and, like most mornings, I soon found myself scrolling through my news feed. I often start with the best of intentions, seeking out the latest on the climate crisis or the invasion of Ukraine, things of that nature… but invariably end up reading about the latest shenanigans from the Johnny Depp trial, or what the world’s richest man is tweeting.
Today was different. Today something of genuine substance caught my attention, and it was an article about Dr Nando de Freitas, a lead researcher at Google’s DeepMind AI division, saying “The Game is Over!” in reference to the creation of human-level artificial intelligence.
Bugger.
According to Dr de Freitas — who has a list of degrees, qualifications, and awards as long as my arm — the question of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is not one of “if”, but of “when”. He says it’s just a matter of scale. We already have the tools and techniques to make a human-level AI, we just need to go bigger.
Perhaps some of you reading are unclear on why this is terrifying, and I’ll cover that in a moment, but I believe a quote from the above article should help get the point across;
“Google…is already working on a “big red button” to mitigate against the risks”
