As a child, I often kept score at the Darts Board for the adults, which considerably sharpened my mental arithmetic and may have led to my early career as an accountant. However, the advent of hand-held calculators and spreadsheets made these skills semi-redundant so that I would now avoid the darts chalkboard like the plague.
Does this make me less intelligent?
Today, we have numerous examples of where technology has killed the use of elements of our brain, ranging from day-to-day Navigation (Who doesn’t use their phone) to the ability to follow a set of instructions without a supporting YouTube “How to video”.
Again, does this make us less intelligent or more productive because we have co-pilots that make us more efficient?
The advent of the internet has had a massively positive impact on our efficiency and day-to-day lives, but it has also made us lazier.
Why bother walking around high-street shops when you can pop online, read reviews, choose items, have them delivered, and send them back if they don’t suit you?
In the same way, why not use previous online baskets to repeat supermarket orders delivered to your doorstep?
However, the critical question is, what are people doing with the extra time created?
The good news is that many use it to get fitter by riding bikes, going on long hikes, or enjoying team sports; however, just as many use it to spend more time on social media, gaming, or watching on-demand TV often making them unfit “couch potatoes”.
In a recent interview, Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, said that ChatGPT should be viewed as announcing what is coming rather than the start of the AI Revolution. He believes the start will occur within the next ten years, when AI enables scientists to produce 1,000s of new cures for human diseases, considerably lengthening life expectancy.
Science has long proven that Humans use only a fraction of their brains, which gives me hope that AI will be a co-pilot that will make many humans much more intelligent and able to make significant scientific breakthroughs that will benefit us all.
The race for AGI or “Artificial General Intelligence” concerns me more. AGI is when artificial intelligence encompasses the ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge in a way that is not limited to a specific task, domain, or discipline”. In other words, machines are capable of independent thought.
Sorry, but why would a computer that is smarter than a human need a human as a Co-pilot?
If AI and robotics replace relatively dull human labour in factories and call centres, it might not be such a bad thing, but AGI will replace lawyers, accountants and doctors, the realm of our most intelligent humans.
The significant danger is that 80% of humans will have less work stimulating their brains and multiple tools to make their daily lives easier. Therefore, their intelligence is likely to decline and not increase.
Conversely, the 20% of humans who increase their intelligence will likely become a “Super Wealthy Elite”, creating even bigger gaps between rich and poor increases, causing social unrest.
How we manage the implementation of AI and AGI will ultimately determine the future of the human race, and the debate needs to start now.
What do you think?