You no doubt heard Steven Hawkins recently prediction that the human race as we know it will come to and end with the creation of a Super Artificial Intelligence.

 

He could be right.

Over the past 60 years, we have seen mechanical processes replicated behaviors and talents we thought were unique to humans,

We are not just redefining what we mean by AI—we are redefining what it means to be human. ( Greed v Poverty.  Muslim v Christian. Wealth v Benefits. Black v White. War v Peace. Health v Consumerism. Life v Death. Gratification v Pain. Space v Sustainability, Climate Change v Profit. To mention just a few)

It will be long before we’ve have to change our minds about what sets us apart. (ISIS v The Rest.)

Every day we are being forced to surrender more of what is supposedly unique about humans and we will spend the next decades doing so.

Indeed, the grandest irony of all, the greatest benefit of an everyday, utilitarian AI will not be increased productivity or an economics of abundance or a new way of doing science—although all those will happen.

The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.

In order to appreciate this we are we going to need a large dose of artificial smartness. Smartness is focused, measurable, specific.

If you think about it, much of the technology humans interact with is about putting you in a particular bucket. This is exactly what Online marketing is about. Making finer and finer distinctions as to which bucket you belong in.

The long-term scientific goal of artificial intelligence is human-level intelligence as it Artificial immortality is to the goals of modern medicine.

AI has attracted more than $17 billion in investments since 2009. Last year alone more than $2 billion was invested in 322 companies with AI-like technology.

Every time you type a query, click on a search-generated link, or create a link on the web, you are training the Google AI.

Each of the 12.1 billion queries that Google’s 1.2 billion searchers conduct each day tutor the deep-learning AI over and over again. With another 10 years of steady improvements to its AI algorithms, plus a thousand-fold more data and 100 times more computing resources, Google will have an unrivaled AI.

At first glance, you might think that Google is beefing up its AI portfolio to improve its search capabilities, since search contributes 80 percent of its revenue. But I think that’s backward. Rather than use AI to make its search better, Google is using search to make its AI better.

My prediction: By 2024, Google’s main product will not be search but AI.( See My Flip board ” Silent Wittiness to Google Ambitions.)

Where are we at the moment?

Parallel computation, bigger data, and deeper algorithms generated the 60-years-in-the-making overnight success of AI. As these technological trends continue—and there’s no reason to think they won’t—AI will keep improving. The smarter it gets, the more people use it. The more people that use it, the smarter it gets.

Our AI future is likely to be ruled by an oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences offering more like IQ as you want but no more than you need.

It is transforming the Internet, the global economy, and civilization. It is enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century ago.

There is almost nothing we can think of that cannot be made new, different, or interesting by infusing it with some extra IQ.

Non-Inheritable Neural Architecture intelligent machines will increasingly replace knowledge workers in the near future.

Many knowledge workers today get paid to do things that computers will soon be able to do. AI will increasingly move up the skill ladder to replace the middle-class workers.

There’s no way a human can keep on top of all possible financial instruments in the world or is it possible for doctors and nurses to stay on top of medical innovations.

Every success in AI redefines it.

A child born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.  Computer Medical diagnostics is a potential “game changer,”

At this very moment it is possible to have you DNA sequence read by 23 and Me (for a fee.)

Curious.  Go on try it.

Find out if you are a suitable partner, what you are most likely to died from, WHETHER YOU ARE going to win the lotto – sorry not true.

We are still a ways off from equaling the processing power of the human brain.

An AI program may be able to write code to manipulate the stock exchange but not the lotto draw. It is still not able to “solve the problem of common sense, of endowing a computer with the knowledge that every 5-year-old is still a few years off.

Representations are the fruits of perception. Recognizing the centrality of perceptual processes makes artificial intelligence more difficult, but it also makes it more interesting, for the two types of process are inextricably intertwined.

As AIs develop, we might have to engineer ways to prevent consciousness in them—and our most premium AI services will likely be advertised as consciousness-free.

In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 start ups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. 

So Is he Right.

New utilitarian AI will also augment us individually as people (deepening our memory, speeding our recognition) and collectively as a species.

Will it replace us.

Rather you than I too comeback in a few hundred years.

Food will differently be different. manufacturing materials  will differently be different, clothes, money, or any branch of science and art will have changed beyond recognition.

Concepts without precepts are empty. The essence of human perception lies in the ability of the mind to hew order from chaos. Perception goes on at many levels.

AI perception will be rigid, inflexible, and unable to adapt to the
problems provided by many different contexts.

Cognition is infused with perception.  If there is none neither human or non human will know which is which. Therefore there will be no interaction between humans and artificially intelligent beings other than war. 

So he is right.