Artificial intelligence threatens humanity with “extinction”, warn experts and businessmen in this booming sector, calling for awareness. But is this still distant disaster scenario credible?
The nightmare, inspired by countless science fiction movies, begins when the machines see that their abilities surpass those of humans and lose control.
paper clip theory
According to a variant imagined by the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, the decisive moment will come when the machines know how to make other machines themselves, causing an “intelligence explosion”.
According to his “clip theory”, if an AI had, for example, the ultimate goal of optimizing the production of this stationery accessory, it would end up covering “first the Earth and then larger and larger chunks of the Universe with paper clips”. , he illustrates.
Nick Bostrom is a controversial figure, having claimed that humanity could be a computer simulation or supported theories close to eugenics. He also recently had to apologize for a racist message sent in the 1990s, which had resurfaced.
His ideas about the dangers of AI remain highly influential, however, inspiring both billionaire Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk and physicist Stephen Hawking, who died in 2018.
“No desire to kill humans”
The image of the red-eyed cyborg from “Terminator”, sent from the future by an AI to end all human resistance, particularly marked the collective unconscious.
But according to experts from the “Stop Killer Robots” campaign, this is not the way autonomous weapons will prevail for years to come, they wrote in a 2021 report.
“Robots aren’t evil,” he says, though he admits that their developers could program them to do harm.
A less obvious scenario involves the use of artificial intelligence to create toxins, or new viruses, with the aim of spreading them around the world.
A group of scientists who used AI to discover new drugs conducted an experiment in which they modified it to search for harmful molecules. In less than six hours they managed to generate 40,000 potentially toxic agents, according to an article in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.
With these technologies, someone might finally find a way to spread a poison like anthrax faster, said Joanna Bryson, an artificial intelligence expert at the Hertie School in Berlin. “But it’s not an existential threat, just a terrible weapon,” she told AFP.
“Sounding the Death Knell for the Human Race”
In apocalypse movies, disaster strikes suddenly and everywhere at once. But what if humanity gradually disappeared, replaced by machines?
However, there are “less grim possibilities”, in which humans augmented with advanced technology could survive. “The purely biological species then ends up becoming extinct,” he continues.
In 2014, Stephen Hawking argued that one day our species would no longer be able to compete with machines, telling the BBC that this “would spell the death knell for the human race.”
Geoffrey Hinton, a researcher trying to create machines that resemble the human brain, most recently for Google, spoke in similar terms of “superintelligences” superior to humans.
On the US channel PBS, he recently stated that it was possible that “humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence.”
Source: BFM TV
