It Turns Out AI Isn’t An Existential Threat
Scientists call bullshit.
According to the likes of Elon Musk, AI is an existential threat to humanity. They claim these machines will keep getting exponentially better, become practically conscious, and eventually eclipse human intelligence to the point that we become just an easily removable annoyance to them. But could AI really go Skynet on us? Or is this just yet more bullshit from the AI hype train? Well, a new study has taken the time to test this hypothesis and found that it is completely false. So, how did they come to that conclusion? And how does this affect the AI industry?
Let’s start with why some people thought AI could do a Skynet.
All an AI program does is recognise patterns in data and then reproduce those patterns when prompted. It is driven purely by statistics and, as such, doesn’t actually “think” or have any conscious knowledge or framework of what it is actually doing. However, some predicted that this would change as AI was fed more data and started to develop “emergent properties”. Emergence is a complex topic that we don’t have the time to go into today. However, the idea behind this prediction was that once the AI model became big enough, unpredictable parts of the AI software would change, enabling the AI to solve problems that weren’t in its training data. This is akin to…
