The best way to avoid the harm that killer robotics and
artificial intelligence can cause is to just ignore it or focus on the
good this technology could do for humans “socially,” says CEO Phil
Libin. He even suggests simply “ignoring” the job losses that result
from AI.
Phil Libin, the CEO of All Turtles, a startup that focuses on turning
AI-related ideas into commercial products and companies said that humans
becoming obsolete should just be ignored and focus should be on the good
killer robots can do for society. In a recent
conversation with Business Insider, Libin said this is the same advice he
got while learning to ride a motorcycle.
His instructor taught him that if an accident happened in front of him
while he was riding on the highway, such as a semi-truck flipping over, the
worst thing to do would be to stare at the truck. Instead, his instructor
said, he should focus on the point he needed to get to in order to avoid
colliding with the truck. That advice seems great if you’re on a
motorcycle, but when one is discussing AI which will make human labor obsolete, it’s a little
more of a tough global concern than that.
“If you look at what you’re trying to avoid, then you’re going to run into
it,” said Libin, who previously founded Evernote. “You’ve got to look at
where you want to be,” he said according to Business Insider. But
with singularity quickly approaching, is there time to ignore the
obvious negative impacts of AI?
Jürgen Schmidhuber, who is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at AI company NNAISENSE, the
Director of the Swiss AI lab IDSIA, and heralded by some as the “father of
artificial intelligence” is confident that the singularity “is just 30 years
away. If the trend doesn’t break, and there will be rather cheap
computational devices that have as many connections as your brain but are
much faster,” he said. “There is no doubt in my mind that AIs are going to
become super smart,” Schmidhuber says.
When biological life emerged from chemical evolution, 3.5 billion years
ago, a random combination of simple, lifeless elements kickstarted the
explosion of species populating the planet today. Something of comparable
magnitude may be about to happen. “Now the universe is making a similar
step forward from lower complexity to higher complexity,” Schmidhuber
beams. “And it’s going to be awesome.” But will it really be awesome when
human beings are made obsolete by their very creations? -SHTFPlan
A recent warning from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)
declared that thousands of jobs are already being lost to robots and those
with the lowest wages are likely to be hardest hit. As it becomes more
expensive to hire people for work because of government interventions such as
minimum wage hikes and overbearing regulations, more companies are shifting
to robotics to save money on labor.
Ray Kurzweil, Google’s chief of engineering, has said that the work
happening right now “will change the nature of humanity itself.” He said robots “will
reach human intelligence by 2029 and life as we know it will end in 2045.”
There is a risk that technology will overtake humanity and make human society
irrelevant at best and extinct at worst.
