Back in 2013, I was still naively expecting Nasa’s JPL and innovative companies like Honda to be lighting the torch to AI and robotics and never appreciated that the future for Mars was more likely to end up as a Space X Boca Chica style scrapyard where wildlife, habitat and the protected waters would end up SQL commented; *”Artificial intelligence (a misnomer if there every was one) is a toy compared to the power of the human brain.”*
Ha ha. I’ve always termed that view, “The Might Man Approach” … as if … as if we humans, somehow, think that we should always remain at the 1top of the tree and be dominant over the rest of Christendom and beyond!
It’s funny that you use the word power to describe the human brain as well.
Your statement is not true though. *Not true at all* now that we are introducing A.I, (and robotics), in an ever expanding and increasing range of markets, disciplines and applications used by mankind.
And anyway, who said the mighty power of the human brain / mind had to be the benchmark or the physical model with intelligence held locally inside a skull case or a box? I mean; Nature has enabled creatures like bees and ants to perform tasks as complex as computing their locations just as accurately as GPS … using their own sensors and crowd sourcing of bee or ant information … with those insects lacking anything qualifying as a brain … or technological infrastructure!
But lets get back to A.I
Specialised A.I (described as narrow A.I or NAI), can, for example, recognise certain types of cancer way more efficiently than a human specialist given the same task. (An A.I based system can scan a global library of cancer images and provide a far more accurate diagnosis than even the best specialists on earth … and it can do so in minutes.)
Humans have already extrapolated that same incredible A.I ability across thousands of other human activities including weather prediction, control of financial markets, flying a passenger jet as well as all the boring but vital tasks of scheduling professional duties, rotas and diaries of people like doctors who are all guided by A.I based software applications these days. Such systems are routinely built into software today, SQL, as you should already appreciate, with these applications now becoming as ubiquitous as the calculator or the spreadsheets we have also, long gone, taken well for granted.
We are currently in the process of witnessing General A.I, (GAI), a general purpose A.I capable of acting upon its own acquisition of knowledge and / or self learning, expanding and improving upon use of that knowledge. Indeed, the work now going into Google’s Deep Mind A.I (or Facebook’s own A.I), is beginning to tell us that human intelligence, while impressive to us, is only one way of comprehending intelligence … or solving problems in the first place.
Point being; Since we hominids stood up, began to invent tools, (about 2.8 million years ago), and then improve upon those original tools, ideas and innovations, we have used human technology as a crutch to enhance our feeble minds and bodies enough to claim dominion on this planet … and along that same timeline, sure, we have now expanded, honed and sharpened that inventive mind.
But you must have a dilemma, SQL, because, on the one hand you wish to boast of the human mind’s incredible abilities BUT, in the same breath, you wish to deny that such a human mind could be clever enough to create an alternate technology … that will, probably, usurp its own intelligence. (Or power as you like to label it).
The version of A.I that will surely do so is Super A.I, (SAI), and yes, make no mistake, that will be arriving within the next … 20 years – 30 years? Or could it manifest in the next 10?
One thing for sure. There will be, possibly, months, weeks or only days to act when SAI arrives within our civilisation because, (despite Elon Musk’s ideas of us all wearing “neural nets” to connect with future A.I dirctly via a brain interface as a means of evolving with it together (ot to keep an eye on it), any intelligence that can gobble up the whole of humanities knowledge in a swift data burst, will already be viewing us mere mortals as no more than an insect fly pitched on a window pane.
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