In the near future, machines will be more intelligent and better at nearly everything than human beings.
A space rock, Asteroid 2024YR4, hurtling through the vacuum at unbelievable speeds, was recently calculated to have a 3.1 per cent chance of hitting earth, the highest probability ever. Further Nasa data and analysis, however, have lowered the risk to 0.0017 per cent probability, meaning it will most likely miss us. It is also not big enough to blow the earth to smithereens, at between 40-90 metres, but still capable of hammering our planet with the explosive force of 7.8 megatonnes of TNT, enough to cause lots of deaths and destruction, according to The Guardian.
Human beings live on this planet as if life was permanent and safe, absorbed with our competition and rivalry and investing the bulk of our resources on ways of destroying life, rather than preserving it. Whenever a new technology is discovered, it is at once applied to new and frightening ways of killing each other. We totally ignore the fact that we have never even found the remotest evidence of life outside our planet. If there is no life outside this planet, then earth is an insanely precious piece of real estate.
True, the universe is a beautiful, cold, deadly thing; vast and violent. Our planet, our solar system, even our galaxy, are insignificant little things by comparison. People like Elon Musk see the risk and are working very hard to take life to other planets, particularly Mars. I do get the sense, though, that if Earth was at risk and humanity had the capacity to lift humans out of the lakes of fire, there would be no seat for Africans in the ships. Unless, somehow, we wake up, wise up and invest our massive resources in our own survival, rather than trying to steal everything.
Universe created by artificial intelligences
If you have ever tried talking about climate change to one of our leaders and were met with insurmountable indifference, you know that the short-termism, the broken vision, and the self-absorption are total –there is no waking up or getting our stuff together. The danger to our existence is not all from space. In the near future, certainly in the lifetime of most of us, machines will be more intelligent and better at nearly everything than human beings. We will live in a universe created by artificial intelligences, which were, in turn, created by other artificial intelligences – not by man. So, will they owe us allegiance? Will they obey us? Would it be normal for a species of superior intelligence and strength to be subservient to a weaker one? Humanity will be organised on a basis other than intellectual endowment. Humanity ranks people on the basis of how clever they are.
This will no longer be necessary as human intelligence will be inferior to machine intelligence. I have seen estimates that by around 2035, most white-collar jobs will no longer exist and that 85 per cent of the jobs in 2030 don’t exist today. Wealth will derive from ownership of capital such as AI manufacturing facilities and land. There will be no work. We will all be just fat pets, living in a Matrix world, created by robots. Generative AI which we are using now is basic artificial intelligence, it learns from data to create new content of its own. So it can look at many paintings then generate a painting, depending on the instructions (or prompt).
Much faster than the human mind
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a different kettle of fish. Here, a computer learns the cognitive abilities of a human being – and surpasses them. Such an intelligence will be capable of reasoning, learning, solving problems and understanding languages. It will be a system that has cloned and improved human intelligence. This could become a reality between 2040 and 2060 after which superintelligence will follow fairly quickly. A super intelligent system will work, think and process data much faster than the human mind. Robots are of course much better suited to inter-stellar exploration. They are not fragile and don’t need the support systems we do. They will fly off into space to mine asteroids and they will be fired into new planets for purposes of terraforming them, that is making them habitable for humans.
These superintelligences will also help us figure out how to cure diseases and extend life. Our nearest galactic neighbour, Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, is 25,000 light years away, 236 followed by 15 zeros kilometres off. Alpha Centauri, the nearest solar system to ours, 4 light years away, or 40 trillion kilometres away from us. If we were to travel at the speed of light – which is impossible – it will take us four years to drop in on our Centauri next door neighbours. Our life expectancy needs to increase to about a million years for us to have a meaningful chance of poking around the Milky Way which of necessity could require us to transfer our consciousness to a more durable container than the fragile biological one we now have.
Thing is, we are sitting ducks to some extent that looking outside our pockets is a foolish flight of fancy. We have reasonably good brains. AI presents us with an opportunity to wipe clean centuries of crawling around, catch up and overtake our oppressors. We just need to be smart about it.
