Steven Hawking Warns of Our Best and Maybe Last Creation (May, 1, 2014)
“Success in creating Artificial Intelligence would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.”
Too late. Artificial intelligence is already rampant, especially in politics, business, economics and all other parts of the Idiocracy, and it's not as good as the average moron thinks it is. Meanwhile, the day when the average computer became smarter than the average human was about 35 years ago when the Commodore 64 was invented. Right now a Wii controller is smarter than the average dumbfuck. One of these things is getting smarter with each passing day, and the other one is watching Faux News and Jerry Springer...
“Success in creating Artificial Intelligence would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.”
Skynet will Trigger Financial Deathstar 2.0
The most imminent and unavoidable threat from technology is the fact that is has totally taken over the financial markets. Having been a computer programmer from 1990 to 2005, I can assert that these crazy Russians writing extremely complex HFT programs using advanced capabilities such as multi-threading etc. have no clue what these will do under adverse conditions. Add several hundreds or thousands of these algorithms all working at various cross-purposes to exploit miniscule price deviations and it's chaos theory writ large. There is no way to anticipate ahead of time what will happen, other that to assume that total meltdown is the most likely scenario.
Beyond that imminent risk, there are many other aspects of technology that have only been looked at in isolation.
The real issue we face is that instead of computers becoming more like humans, humans are becoming more like computers.
Pervasive structural unemployment: The most imminent and unavoidable threat from technology is the fact that is has totally taken over the financial markets. Having been a computer programmer from 1990 to 2005, I can assert that these crazy Russians writing extremely complex HFT programs using advanced capabilities such as multi-threading etc. have no clue what these will do under adverse conditions. Add several hundreds or thousands of these algorithms all working at various cross-purposes to exploit miniscule price deviations and it's chaos theory writ large. There is no way to anticipate ahead of time what will happen, other that to assume that total meltdown is the most likely scenario.
Beyond that imminent risk, there are many other aspects of technology that have only been looked at in isolation.
The real issue we face is that instead of computers becoming more like humans, humans are becoming more like computers.
Breakdown in Meaningful Social Interaction
Speaking of computer-like behaviour, each generation is becoming increasingly more tethered to their gadgets and less capable or willing to engage in meaningful social interaction. Clearly, the trend was well underway with television and the temptation to spend four hours each evening in couch potato mode. However, with pervasive technology the trend is accelerating. The technology addicted society fits well with the entire transactional nature of the corporatized society. Every relationship is being dwindled down towards a millisecond dopamine hit instantly interrupted by the next scrolling "item of interest".Automation has systematically eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs, if not millions. It's abundantly clear, that the productivity gains from technology are accruing to an ever dwindling set of ultra-wealthy individuals. If this continues unabated, then we are heading for some sort of dystopian world in which a handful of people live in obscene wealth with every whim attended to by robots, while the rest of the population scavenges the landfill for scraps. This idea that re-training would keep people gainfully employed was the biggest joke ever sold. The accelerating rate of technology disruption combined with relentless outsourcing is leaving an ever-increasing number of structurally unemployed who are no longer considered employable - under any circumstance i.e. the extended length of unemployment sends its own signal to the market, that someone is "tainted" for employment.
Epidemic Attention Deficit Disorder
According to the book "The Shallows", constantly switching attention from one subject to another e.g. Twitter feeds, alters the "plasticity" of the brain and leads to ever-dwindling ability to concentrate for any length of time. Add in iGadgets and iPods and we are potentially raising a generation of people who are incapable of sitting still long enough to read an entire book. I don't remember what the rest of that book said, because I never finished it.
A society that doesn't know anything and doesn't want to know anything
Somehow the internet has achieved the exact opposite of the outcome for which it was intended - for the vast majority, instead of making them more intelligent, it has dumbed them down to door knob status. I can't fully understand why this happened, likely due to a variety of factors, however something about having Google at one's fingertips has made people think they know everything and therefore don't need to keep reading past the first paragraph on Wikipedia.
Hyperviolent Video Games
At some point in the not too distant future there will be a generation of teenage boys who never leave the basement, except to go out "hunting", like this kid in Minnesota was planning to do this week i.e. bomb schools and kill his own family.
Mass Sexual Predation/Child Pornography
This article indicates that there are upwards of 20 million separate IP addresses (computers) hosting or accessing child pornography on the internet on a regular basis. Meanwhile, one "honey pot" (i.e. police posing as child) attracted upwards of 27,000 solicitations. The sheer volume of this disgusting garbage has exploded since the internet rose to ubiquity in the mid-1990s.
Big Brother spying, monitoring and tracking
George Orwell apparently predicted the internet 80 years ago, because it has been an absolute boon for agencies like the NSA or any other agency that wants to track the whereabouts of people. From CCTV cameras, credit card records, cell phone records, computer files etc. the "authorities" can track all of us down to the minute.
At risk of coming across as a luddite, it occurs to me that the question on the table is what will come first - machines outliving their usefulness to humans or humans outliving their usefulness to machines?
