The human race has faced deadly challenges for the protection of its survival as "species" as its own creative invention-the machine-is thought to be anticipating the human intelligence and delving into driving it towards the ultimate space of extinction. A pole axing and nonplussed situation even to think of! Of course, the question of whether it is nearby or far-off is a matter of scientific mathematics and calculation, but what is ostensibly and tangibly pronounced is the fear factor of "human race is dying" is a reality that we are living off! So, what future is awaiting for the human race is a crucial issue for our school of thought.
Extinction is a dreadful word itself and we never intend to be perished over time. Before we would read and were used to the extinction issue of humongous creatures like dinosaurs and got ourselves habituated to it, but the most intelligent species of the planet would become effete over the times and fall prey to extinction was delusionary even few years back! So, the whispering and even thought of the extinction of the human race is repulsive to many of us, to say the least! And to crown it all, the human race has got to lose space to very intelligent and crafty evolution of the machines is not only nauseating, but also roundly unasked-for. So, what has propelled us to draw the finishing line over the future of human race?
The celebrated British physicist Stephen Hawking warns in an interview with BBC that the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Louis Del Monte, a physicist and the author of "The Artificial Intelligence Revolution" has warned that humans won't be running the world anymore in 30 years time - robots will be. Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, refers to the point in time when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence as "the singularity," which he predicts could come as early as 2045.
The evolution of machines into intelligent and self-reliant instruments has posed great threat to the intelligence of human brains that we thought of as "incontrovertible". Instilling sense, brain, emotion and biological function into a machine arouses its fertility and thinking process. That is not very comfortable for human race. Many scientists have opined that most of the human race will have become cyborgs by the end of the century. Del Monte told Business Insider, "The allure will be immortality. Machines will make breakthroughs in medical technology, most of the human race will have more leisure time, and we'll think we've never had it better. The concern I'm raising is that the machines will view us as an unpredictable and dangerous species."
Unfortunately, human race as "Species" has conspicuously endangered itself by creating lethal weapons and germinating the lust for prosaic "aggrandizement" into its psyche, which incessantly eggs on human brains to fight with others to attain mundane supremacy, of course at the expense of being extinct over the times. Humanity has now become really unstable. We have husbanded more time, money, energy and intellectuality to invent mass weapons that can wipe out the world twice over and makes computer viruses rather than how could make the planet and the human race safe from being extinct.
The lust for intellectual frenzy of few humans has threatened, most uncomfortably, the very existence of the human race. How inclement and controversial evolution of human grey matters has turned out to be! Indubitably, the failure of human race to limit the exponential increase of intelligence in machines or to set forth legislation regarding how much intelligence a machine can have, how interconnected it can be has expedited the very process of extinction of the human race. If that continues-given the exponential trend -- we could easily conjecture human race will reach the singularity much earlier than most experts happen to believe. And then the top species will no longer be humans, but machines.
The degeneration of human DNA is other unkind facet of human extinction. Why? The reason is the increasing numbers of mutations that are being rubbed off onto from generation to generation have been keeping body system effete and fragile. According to Dr John Sanford of Cornell University, every one of us already carries tens of thousands of harmful mutations, and each of us will pass on approximately 100 new mutations to future generations. This sort of degeneration of humanity is dangerous as it creates uncertainty-an uncertain future. On biological ground, due to degeneration of human DNA, the number of mutations will become so great that we will no longer be able to produce viable offspring. On the other hand, machines are getting stronger. The artificial innovation is, in fact, intimidating the human race. Despite all of advanced technology, genetically-related diseases are absolutely exploding across the globe. Our bodies are becoming weak and frail, and with each passing generation it is getting even worse. This creates opportunities for machines to take over.
Another perplexing issue is human immune system, which is becoming slowly weakened. Our overmuch dependency on medication for survival is the cause to it. Many physicians have already warned us against taking antibiotics indiscriminately. It is an educated guess that in a very near future, antibiotics will turn into ineffectuality, which will instigate to collapse our immune system. We are approaching into a future in which, with the help of supplements, we shall be regulating our hormones to maximize our wellbeing. This dependence upon additional hormones will reach the point where it might stop working for itself while the supplements may be doing same instead.
This will surely imperil the processes, which create hormones and it would become less important for survival since our body would always have enough thanks to the supplements. It is not unlikely that humans would evolve to the point where hormones will no longer be created organically within our bodies. It means if external aids were entirely responsible for our survival, many of our internal functions might become obsolete. We should be aware of the fact that our body needs a powerful immune system to fight diseases. But the machines have no such reliance upon supplements or antibiotics. It has its own electrical body function that holds much more strength than a man does and it could even ignite the machine's brain function than a human brain, thereby creating a war between human intelligence and mechanical smarts. We can deduce easily that due to weakened immune system, the human intelligence will become pale before robotic functionality.
Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal said, "We need to be very careful. I'm increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international levels, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish." Absence of emotional layer in machines could jeopardize the capacity of and human nature in the human race. But by the same token, the presence of emotional layer in machines could put forth problems for mankind. It is therefore all about regulation that could stop the machines from advancing towards destroying the humankind.
In the countries of advanced economies, machines are already being replaced for men. The human hand behind creative industrial revolution is losing its stakes to mechanical hands. That is a huge concern. Can we afford to leave humans out of employment just for benefits? A faltering economy explains much of the job shortage in America, but advancing technology has sharply magnified the effect, more so than is generally understood, according to two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The fear factor is many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machines. The skills of machines are improving while the same of human beings are being discarded. An alarming situation for the human race! In the current issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, W Brian Arthur, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, warns that technology is quickly taking over service jobs, following the waves of automation of farm and factory work. "This last repository of jobs is shrinking - fewer of us in the future may have white-collar business process jobs - and we have a problem," Mr Arthur writes.
We should not forget that a machine of superior design and intelligence can think like a human-sometimes much quicker than a human, which means it could figure out in five minutes what would take a human a decade. In the essay "The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction", Tim Urban has exposed us to two pretty shocking facts regarding the advent of artificial intelligence to absorb:
1) The advent of ASI (Artificial Super-intelligence) will, for the first time, open up the possibility for a species to land on the immortality side of the balance beam.
2) The advent of ASI will make such an unimaginably dramatic impact that it's likely to knock the human race off the beam, in one direction or the other.
So, the human race is on low ebb in terms of sustainability and survivability as "Species". The radical improvisation of machines vis-à -vis adaptability to the human world is surpassing the expectation level of human thought. While machines are being bodily able, humans are being disabled and feeble. While machines are given out more jobs, humans are kept left out. While machines are shaping human thought system, humans are allowing machines to think for them. While industrialization commands more machines, it prefers fewer humans! So, Nick Bostrom rightly writes that we have what may be an extremely difficult problem with an unknown time to solve it, on which quite possibly the entire future of humanity depends. So what is the alternative? The fitting answer to this pesky question has come in hand is "In medicine, law, finance, retailing, manufacturing and even scientific discovery, the key to winning the race is not to compete against machines, but to compete with machines." This is a statement from two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And I agree to it.
The writer is Chief Executive Officer (CEO), BKMEA. Email: sulavun@yahoo.co.uk
Fear of extinction of human race
Sulav Chowdhury | Published: July 11, 2015 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00
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