Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) The End Of Humanity

Hi all, if you’ve been reading my blogs or reading my books you know I’m a positive person and truly believe “Happiness Is The Forgotten Ingredient In Life.” You also know, I have always given my personal and honest opinion on many subjects even if that opinion negatively reflects on me personally. I’m writing this blog not to bum you out, but to tell you how I feel about the technology world that I personally was and am involved in for the majority of my life.

Question: Is technology and the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) going to be the end of humanity.

I’m sitting at my computer, having my five o’clock scotch, and this question popped into my mind and I felt compelled to blog about it. Please try not to see the negative in this blog, just the reality of what I know from the experience I’ve had in the early years of technology, the reality of today and my fears, concerns and the opportunities coming in the future.

Before I continue, I’m going to live until the year 2038. I can only see or project the reality of “AI” in my last twenty years of life. I’ll leave it up to the science fiction writers to expand beyond 2038.

The technology age started in the fifties. We’ve had the stone age and then the industrial age and now the technology age. In the fifties, when companies like IBM (just like IBM - there were other people and companies that were advancing technology, but IBM created a Corporate market for how technologies (then called computers) could be used to make companies more profitable.

We all know the positives of computers. They certainly have given me a wonderful and prosperous career. I couldn’t be writing this blog if I didn’t have a computer and the internet.

The purpose of the IBM computers was to compute (hence the word computers). Humans just couldn’t compute mathematical or other kinds of data as fast as a computer. All the other sources (the pen, the abacus and the calculator required human interface. The computer could do the same thing faster and as the technology got even better, much, much faster.

BTW, the technology paradigm is that computers (and now other technologies like “AI”) will double every year. You heard me, not every ten years – every year.

Computing stopped being the sole purpose of computers a few years after their primary objective. Reducing the cost of labor (THE mostly costly aspect of any company) became the Holly Grail of technology companies. This is still the primary reasons of technology today.

Manufacturing and product packaging are now run by intelligent robots not human workers. On the manufacturing and product packaging floor there used to be ten now there are two. In every department of a company computing and now “AI” is reducing the need for manpower by fifty percent or more. As an example, the major cost of Ride Sharing Companies (i.e. UBER) are its drivers. In just a few years an UBER car will pick me up at my house without a driver. This will be true of long-haul truck drivers, delivery people, etc. etc.

In the next twenty years the only humans who will have decent paying jobs will be Programmers, highly skilled workers in highly skilled companies and people with great vision to create the next big thing. Believe it or not, in my lifetime a real looking “AI” robot will be delivering your TV news not the human anchor you see today. After my lifetime there won’t be any need for skilled Programmers because “AI” Bots will write their own code.

In the military, “AI” is already changing the way we fight the enemy. Not just Drones will do the fighting, but non-human Bots will do the fighting.

There is something I want to say about that:

Isaac Asimov the renowned Science Fiction writer wrote fifty years ago that in the development of Robots the world should agree on two rules. Rule number One, a Robot should never harm another Human Being and two, a Robot should only take directions from another Human Being unless that Human Being’s directions break Rule number One.

Today those two rules are being broken by the military. I know they are doing so to protect us against the enemy, but once we break those two rules, who’s to say the Bots won’t kill the good guys.

All of this (no jobs for the masses and Bots killing Humans) is going to affect our Humanity as we know it today. In my last twenty years of my life, I’ll be interested how society reacts to these changes because many good things will come from “AI.”

National and individual security will be much better because of “AI.” The downside is that our privacy will suffer. Today, people are willing to give up some privacy to be safer. Today, we gladly give our personal information out to the internet because we believe it won’t come back and haunt us even though many people have been burned by their own personal information.

“AI” is making it easier to get information – “OK Google, where is a Mexican restaurant near me.” “Alexa, order me a mushroom pizza from Pizza Hut.”

“AI” is allowing us to have intelligent appliances that can turn on when we want and even order groceries when we run out. We now can go to a kiosk and get a Big Mac without talking to a human.

Sooo, will “AI” destroy humanity or will it benefit humanity?

My Answer Is, It Will Do What We (Humans) Allow It To Do