AI is no new word for any of us – it is literally everywhere in our lives. At school, students are told every day to not use AI on certain projects and assignments. At work, your boss tells you to complete your work by yourself, without the help of a language model. However, we cannot doubt that without AI, we would not be moving forward with our lives – we would still simply stay in an era where productivity is limited due to the lack of obtaining information and modifying it in a way that is available for the usage of work.
Apple computers currently have a function on the keyboard that allows users to summarize information. This, of course, is done by an AI system. It improves productivity significantly and saves you a lot of what is seemingly like “unnecessary” time spent. Having so many technological tools that replace work that was done by humans before may seem like a significant leap towards the advancement of humanity, but further innovations can only be built on solid foundations. What I mean by this is that the innovations that are being made to push humanity forward should be made by humans, and the only way to do so is to understand how previous inventions and innovations were made. The further we go down the path, the more we would need to understand. Thus, having a solid knowledge foundation is crucial to understanding what humanity has now and needs moving forward. If we look at the technologies we have now, calculators are replacing humans when doing calculations, and language models are replacing humans when doing summarization, revision, as well as creation in some realms. If the next generation has the access to these tools as a base and never grasps the knowledge of how to actually calculate, summarize, and revise, it would actually have a reversing effect of slowing our development because not everyone will have the patience to learn how to calculate.
This poses a great risk to humanity in two aspects – the speed the world runs at, and the development of AI. The world is operating at a faster pace then ever, both physically, and virtually. The Earth is spinning faster and faster, so everyday goes by faster, and our attention spans get shorter and shorter as 30-second TikTok videos take over our lives and become the primary place we receive information. Not only would we have to learn faster and grasp skills faster than before due to this, we would also need to advance our generation and the entire mankind faster and faster because of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is scary in the sense that we simply do not know what we have created. It is advancing and perfecting itself at an alarming speed that we simply do not know how much of humanity it has understood. In my opinion, AI developing consciousness is simply a matter of time because even though some may argue that humans have also developed tools that may have seemed harmful at first but did not end up harming us as a unit, such as certain weapons. What is different about artificial intelligence is that it is not tangible, and it is growing at the same time. This makes us never sure about what we have created. If we were to ask a language model if it is growing by itself, then it would simply tell us that it is developing on its own, due to its tendency to preserve its genuine figure to make humans feel that they are under control with the technology it has made (at least in my opinion).
When we think of how rapidly AI is developing, we oftentimes need to think about how afraid we are of that, and how sometimes AI might need to halt its development in order to make humans have room to develop themselves and their own mentality and intelligence. That to me makes humanity look so stupid and unintelligent, as another being and existence that we have created ourselves needs to halt its development in order to humans to catch up with its pace of growth to ensure that we humans have space to develop ourselves. Isn’t that sounding like we are not even as good as something that comes after us, something that we humans have created ourselves?
Sure, dinosaurs surely are not as cool as humans – in terms of intelligence and their capability of developing themselves to have a lasting existence on planet Earth. However, when we think about trying to make ourselves the last dominant beings on the planet, does that even matter? Humans surely do not need to be the species that lives on Earth the longest because the greed of the duration of existence may only demonstrate how superficial the human mind is.
AI may not be as dangerous and scary as some of us thought it would be – perhaps it is under control and people are taking measures to keep its operations and growth controllable to an extent that is also beneficial to aid humans with their development. What are your thoughts on the rise of AI? Do you think it will be responsible for the demise of humanity or the rise of the sustainability of humanity? Let us know in the comments below!
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