Editorial

Threat of AI

AI has been developed so that it can learn, adapt and grow on its own

February 25, 2023

As technology progress at rapid pace, artificial intelligence (AI) has taken precedence due to its immense potential of transforming the world. It essentially has been developed from human curiosity of creating a brain or consciousness in a machine so that it can learn, adapt and grow on its own. With new and improved AI versions entering our daily lives — such as chatbots, art generators and physical machines — many entrepreneurs and computer scientists continue to fantasise about the revolutionary aspect of how AI can change the essence of human life on this planet. However, a huge segment of the population is extremely wary about the consequences of such technology.

Elon Musk and many others have warned about the perils of unfettered AI development. Noam Chomsky believes that due to its statistical nature, AI will never understand the nature of intelligent being or about cognition. There is also another consequence that few have highlighted, and that is the risk posed to human rights. In this regard, the UN rights chief has recently warned that advances in AI pose a grave threat to international security, stability and accountability. The reason for this is that many countries have developed ‘slaughterbots’ that are designed to kill without human intervention. By alienating human from the act of killing itself, AI could indeed escalate military conflicts around the world — since we have seen post WWII what violence does to the human brain. The UN chief calls for preserving human agency and dignity in the wake of such technology and to at least have regulations and guardrails in place when using AI.

Do we have a backdoor in place if things get out of hand? While humanity can reap the countless benefits of AI, it cannot prevail over our lives. Human consciousness cannot be replicated.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 25^th, 2023.

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COMMENTS (1)

Grant Castillou | 1 year ago | Reply It s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness which came first in evolution and that humans share with other conscious animals and higher order consciousness which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first. What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990 s and 2000 s. These machines perform in the real world not in a restricted simulated world and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness such as perceptual categorization memory and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions in a parsimonious way. No other research I ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing. I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work that there s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine primary and higher-order. My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first and proceed from there by applying to Jeff Krichmar s lab at UC Irvine possibly. Dr. Edelman s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https arxiv.org abs 2105.10461

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