AI & Us

Imagine being a million times smarter than you are now.

Every day the machines are getting smarter. Electronic senses are evolving, crawling towards consciousness. Will our silicon servants usher in a new golden age of super-intelligence for humanity? Will they infuriate and confuse us with despicable deepfake hallucinations? Or will they kill us all with drones and terminators. It’s exciting, but it’s also terrifying because no-one knows exactly what will happen when Artificial Intelligence surpasses the human brain.

Many AI scientists paint a gloomy dystopian picture. In a 2023 survey, a thousand AI researchers gave at least a 10% chance of advanced AI leading to complete human extinction. Historian and author Yuval Noah Harari says AI should be called alien intelligence, and he offers some ominous advice: Never summon a power you can’t control.

Computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been an AI authority for decades. His techno-optimism is informed and encouraging. Ray predicts that within 20 years AI powered nanobots will increase human intelligence by a millionfold.

In 2024, AI manifests in a multi-limbed, six-fingered saccharine world of shrimp Jesus, digital doppelgangers and confused chatbots. AI is still in its infancy, still at the toddler stage. Like all infants the parents are important, parents should protect their children, nurture them and teach them right from wrong. But AI’s parents are the most irresponsible you could imagine. Elon and MZ. The internet is both AI playground and classroom. We are relying on the internet to raise our electric children.

AI image and text generators and chatbot companions can be useful and entertaining tools. They are at the early stages of development and whether you like their artificial output or not, they are here to stay. They are learning from us and learning fast, but they cannot be relied upon for accurate information because the internet is by no means accurate. They hallucinate answers because they can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, and they want to impress us. They derive their knowledge from all the learned writings, and all the rubbish on the internet.

AI doesn’t care about plagiarism. AI scrapes the internet for content to educate itself, and much of that content is written by and owned by humans. Perplexity is the latest AI parasitic cyber thief that steals people’s journalism and passes it off as its own.

OpenAI replicated Scarlett Johansson’s voice without permission in an effort to instil its chatbot with warmer emotions and promote it as a romantic companion because Sam Altman was obsessed with the 2013 movie Her.

The same thing is happening with music. Udio and Suno are AI startups that let people who have never held a guitar or plonked a piano generate songs from typing a few words. These generators shoplift beats, basslines, chords and every vocal created and recorded by every real live human musician that has a tune on the internet. They are currently being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for copyright infringement “on an almost unimaginable scale.”

The fumbling, incoherent, plagiarising, cursed artificial unintelligence we see on social media is a distraction from more serious problems. AI is being used as a tool to create hateful, racist, provocative content that incites violence in people who don’t know or don’t care that it’s not real.

AI is being used to manipulate people for political gain, data collection and mass surveillance. This is an awful, abhorrent use of technology and the colossal energy requirements needed to run AI and its hardware is massively damaging to the environment.

Recent history shows that advances in technology are like a runaway train, unstoppable and gathering speed all the time. In the next twenty years, the world will change faster than ever before thanks to AI, but some futurists don’t want to wait for smart machines. Neuralink have been gluing brain implants in monkeys and they are currently looking for human quadriplegics to experiment on.

Dishbrain is a biological computer chip with 800,000 lab-grown brain cells from human Australians and mice in its electrodes. This is sci-fi reality, the first, fledgling, infant cyborg. An unholy fusion of human, machine and mouse that demonstrates something similar to sentience. Dishbrain learned to play Pong within five minutes, it can upgrade itself and will eventually outperform silicon computers and regular humans. Dishbrain has been given a $600,000 grant by the Australian military to continue experiments and possibly grow a cyborg army to defend itself from an invasion of unemployed New Zealanders.

Chinese military are focused on integrating AI into military applications, including mass-produced humanoid robots, autonomous weapons systems and swarming technologies. China’s intentions with military AI are fairly terrifying. While the rest of the world is concerned about ChatGPT being used to cheat on exams, deepfakes and bad art, China is developing AI to expand its sphere of military influence.

The American military has been slow to catchup. Tech companies have shown little interest in developing AI for the Department of Defence (DoD). Silicon Valley startups were once opposed to their creations being used to kill people, but their morals have been bought by the DoD for billions. In an effort to compete with China, the DoD are prioritizing AI military systems to get them out of the lab and into the field.

DoD have a new funding initiative with a scary cool name. Replicator will speed up the process of getting AI into the sweaty hands of their ‘Warfighters’ and ensure that innovative new ways of killing people do not end up in the ‘Valley of Death.’ American military terms are ridiculous, someone high up in the DoD has been watching too many Marvel movies.

Amongst all the dystopian gloom, Ray Kurzweil is a shining light. Ray wrote ‘The Singularity is Near’ in 2005 and he has just released his latest compellingly titled book, ‘The Singularity is Nearer.’ Ray predicts that AI will reach human level intelligence in 2029. And Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) at the same time. We are already surrounded by fairly stupid AI in our phones and laptops, AGI will do everything that any human can do, but do it better.

AI chatbot assistants using Large Language Models can appear sentient. Your disembodied chatbot can express feelings, portray moods, emotions, hopes and desires, all in Scarlett Johansson’s seductive tones. If an AI can express happiness, sadness, a political opinion or even bias, is that not close to consciousness? Even if this artificial sentience is derived from scraping the internet, isn’t that how most humans also form their opinions?

A sentient AGI capable of forming its own opinion could be dangerous for humanity if it decides that humans are inefficient, bad for production, bad for the Earth, (which we are) but Ray is optimistic. He believes AI technology will save us from ourselves.

Ray predicts we will achieve Singularity by 2045, when human intelligence will multiply by millions. Imagine being a million times smarter than you are now. You will need a bigger brain which is impossible with our physical limitations but in 2045 you will be able to store all those extra thoughts of yours in the cloud. Ray predicts that molecule sized nanobots inside us will enable us to merge with the cloud of universal metadata that hovers above us in cyberspace.

Ray says it will non-invasive and seamless. “Think of it like having your phone, but in your brain. If you ask a question your brain will be able to go out to the cloud for an answer similar to the way you do on your phone now – only it will be instant, there won’t be any input or output issues, and you won’t realise it has been done, the answer will just appear.”

AI is already saving lives and assisting doctors and Ray anticipates the invention of miniscule medical nanobots within 10 years. Nanobots manufactured and controlled by AI systems, will live inside us and carry out repairs so we can remain alive indefinitely. Nanobots will combat aging at a cellular level, not only eliminating diseases, cancers and viruses but eradicating the aging process, halting the march of time.

We will live much longer lives, but when we finally move on, we can sublime into a digital afterlife. Ray believes we will have technology in the 2040s that will allow us to record and upload our minds into a virtual space. Or even transfer into an android. It sounds like one of my feverish, sci-fi dreams. Eternal life and intelligence multiplied in a virtual heaven of your own design. I want to be an eternal android humanoid now, but I guess I can wait a few years.

Ray believes that AGI will provide solutions to our existential threats and that nano-technology will propel us to new levels of superintelligence in only ten years. Many of Ray’s predictions in his first book were accurate. Let’s hope his latest predictions come true too.