Today, artificial intelligence is part of everyday life. Since the invention of artificial intelligence, humanity has been using it more an...
Today, artificial intelligence is part of everyday life. Since the invention of artificial intelligence, humanity has been using it more and more widely, and thinking about how AI will affect the future of humanity.
It is clear that the application of artificial intelligence is bringing about a major change in the economy, and with it in human society and the way society works. It can be seen that AI has capabilities that were previously only available to humans, and in these capabilities, previously attributed only to humans, it is surpassing human performance. AI is taking over the role of humans in many tasks, outperforming humans, and it is certainly capable of tasks that do not even exist today also.
Our thinking about artificial intelligence today is dominated by the fact that artificial intelligence is taking over the place of humans in a significant way. We see AI replacing humans in fundamental ways and in a wide range of areas. We see today that the application of artificial intelligence will bring fundamental changes to human society and will influence the future of humanity in a profound manner.
How will artificial intelligence transform the future of humanity?
There are many possible theories, including that casts doubt on the future of the human race and sees machines taking the place of humans through artificial intelligence. The stakes are high, the future of humanity is in doubt. Artificial intelligence, for example, has already beaten humans at chess, can recognize things better than humans, can learn games quickly and alone, can drive a car on its own, can diagnose diseases more accurately than a qualified doctor. These are just some of the countless areas where AI is better than humans. And this is just the beginning. What does the future have to bring?
Will artificial intelligence replace humans? Or, better, will it exist in symbiosis with humanity on an equal footing? There are several possible futures, scary or optimistic, but which will be ours? To see the future more clearly, we need to see the present accurately. What is artificial intelligence today?
We call artificial intelligence intelligent because we designed it to work intelligently. Today's artificial intelligence can recognize relations between data in large data sets more efficiently than humans. The human brain is limited in capacity and speed of operation, artificial intelligence is not. Not surprisingly, AI outperforms humans in AI's special field.
But how intelligent is artificial intelligence?
This question can be answered by defining what intelligence is. According to the dictionary, intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.
According to Wikipedia intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information, and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.
Intelligence is problem-solving thinking.
It is clear that today's artificial intelligence covers only part of what we call intelligence. Even reinforcement learning based artificial intelligence systems, which currently perhaps on the highest level of artificial intelligence, cover a larger, but still only a small part of the general concept of intelligence.
Today's artificial intelligence systems are not intelligent in the definitive meaning of intelligence. They are capable of solving certain tasks that require intelligence, but they do not have the capability of intelligence in general. What today's artificial intelligence is capable of, however, is that it can outperform humans in certain tasks, but this does not mean that it can replace humans, but that it can take over from humans in certain areas. The steam engine can replace many human tasks, much better in the areas it is capable of, but it does not replace humans. So is artificial intelligence today. Today's artificial intelligence is not intelligent in the classical sense of intelligence, but is capable of solving tasks that we previously thought could only be solved by having general intelligence.
If today's artificial intelligence is not intelligent in the classical sense, if it cannot replace human beings, why are we still concerned about the future it brings for humanity?
The concern that the development of artificial intelligence will lead to natural intelligence (which is not what is called artificial general intelligence in the literature, because artificial general intelligence is still a context-searching algorithm that is not specialized in data quality) is not well founded. Not because it would be impossible to create classical intelligence in the definitive meaning artificially, but because science does not work as an extrapolation of current developments. There is no way of knowing when the development of artificial intelligence will approach natural intelligence, so worrying about this today is unnecessary. At present, there are fundamental problems and gaps in this area of science.
The main well founded concern of society is, that today's artificial intelligence is in many areas and increasingly many ways more capable and better than human performance. This concern is real. Artificial intelligence can replace human work, i.e. humans, in growing areas. However, the consequence of this is not necessarily that humans will become redundant or that human society will decline. The invention of the arrow has made many people redundant in the hunt, yet human has not become redundant, and human society has grown rather than shrunk as a result. The invention of the wheel made many people redundant in transportation, yet human did not become redundant, and human society grew rather than declined after the invention of the wheel. The invention of the steam engine made many people redundant through the use of artificial power, yet human did not become redundant, and human society grew rather than declined after the invention of the steam engine. The invention of the computer has made many people redundant in the management of processes, yet human has not become redundant, and human society has grown rather than declined even after the invention of the computer.
For natural intelligence, for the humans, these technological inventions are tools to enhance capabilities to solve problems. Artificial intelligence is also a tool for human intelligence to use it to solve problems. Humans cannot be replaced for the foreseeable future. Indeed, AI is replacing the work of many people, and more people's work will become redundant as AI develops. However, the consequence of this process is not necessarily that humans will become redundant or that humanity will diminish.
It is important to see that the size of humanity is not a direct consequence of the knowledge available to mankind. It looks like that the size of humanity is proportional to the amount of knowledge available. It is generally believed that, for example, the invention of the arrow made hunting more efficient, or the use of agriculture made more food available allowed human groups to grow. But the reality is that the size of human societies is primarily determined by necessities, not possibilities. In the intelligent human society, possibility is a condition, and not directly lead to a consequence.
The instinct of species reproduction works for humans. However, while in the case of an animal species the number of individuals is clearly proportional to the amount of resources available, hence possibility leads to consequence, in the case of the intelligent human species, this relationship is not strict and direct. Human reproduction is not motivated solely, or even primarily by instinct and resources, but by conscious needs. The human race increased with the invention of the arrow not because more food became available, but because the becoming possible larger group was better able to defend itself from attack by other groups. More food was only the condition for the larger group, not the cause of it. Humanity did not grow with the invention of agriculture because more food became available, but because more workers were needed to produce goods and serve the owners of those goods. And the population of many developed countries is now declining not because there are not enough resources for a larger population, but because less people are needed to do the jobs that humans need to do. The rich countries are rich because more resources are available, and they are declining in population because more machines are doing the work of people, hence fewer people are needed. Poor countries are not growing because more resources are available, they are growing because more people are needed to work for more resources, and poorer conditions do not allow the use of machines.
In the case of the intelligent species, the correlation is that need determines population size, not opportunity. Opportunity is the requirement, need is the cause. For intelligent species, this is the natural relationship.
The application of artificial intelligence is a new resource and a new opportunity for humanity, but it does not necessarily lead to population growth or decline. Even if the resources increase, still, if the need for more people does not arise, the human population will decrease. History shows that, until very recently, shortly after each scientific technical revolution, the need arose to increase the amount of human resources available, and resulted in an increase in the population. Human beings are intelligent, problem-solving and inventive creatures, perhaps this will be also the case now, in the age of artificial intelligence. But maybe not. Current scientific technological progress is so fast that it is difficult to keep up with social processes. Perhaps now natural intelligence cannot find a new field where human resources are needed. But it may also be that natural intelligence does not want to find a new area for need for human because the population decline is not an irresolvable problem for society.
The declining population of modern societies is a natural process, not directly dependent to technological advances. Scientific technological progress, including artificial intelligence, is replacing human labor in more and more areas. In the short term this creates tensions, but in the longer-term humanity can solve this problem. Either we can accept the natural process, the decline in humans needed, and its corollary, the decline in population, and adapt intelligently to the new conditions, or we can invent some new need, which creates new need for humans. At present, the latter future seems less likely.
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