Artificial intelligence is a hot topic nowadays, the more so recent studies have proved that robots can be designed with the awareness trait, which is exclusively found in humans. Awareness brings along conscience and rationality, which means that soon we will have humans without guts and warm blood, running down the streets, picking up the morning paper.
Artificial intelligence could be a reality within years rather than decades, as scientists have stated. Elon Musk has recently warned that AI has the disastrous potential to be as dangerous to mankind as nuclear weapons are. Elon Musk does nothing but enforce visionary perspectives that we can read in acknowledged books, written by Huxley, Asimov, George Orwell and many others. They all envisioned predictions about a time when we will fail to be enough for ourselves and our minds will think of building alternative structures to “help” us survive. But unfortunately we are a race driven towards destruction rather than progress, as history and the natural laws of life have proven to us, so there could be a time when robots take over humanity and become our most frightened enemies. The enemies we’ve managed to build ourselves, ironically enough.
Other enlightened minds speculate that artificial intelligence could sometime soon take the shape of a new religion. But this does not mean that faith allows AI to do more good than harm. We have a history behind, which has shown that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Religion is always well intended but it is filtered by our minds that are sometimes incapable of perceiving a reality beyond their own boundaries of understanding. And if understanding is shaded by boundaries, extremes appear and religion is prone to wreak havoc in societies.
The Big International Joint Conference which was held last month in Buenos Aires hosted personalities that have a very heavy opinion to lay on top of the matter. Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and plenty of personalities from Apple and Google stated that autonomous battle robots must be obliterated from mankind, before they kill us all. According to the expert statements, these automated killing machines might someday fall into the wrong hands and trigger a worldwide arms race that “will make deathbots as ubiquitous tomorrow as machine guns are today”.
As harmless as they could appear or as good as the intention of building a helping robot could be, human mind works in mysterious ways. And robots will be made to work in mysterious ways as well, especially if they develop the unpredictable awareness trait.
Image Source: a2isystems.com
