What If AI Becomes Self Aware? | Unveiled

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What If AI Becomes Self Aware</h4>

In June of 1956, Dwight Eisenhower was President of the United States. Interstate highways were first being built all across America, and Elvis was exploding onto the scene with “Heartbreak Hotel.” At the same time, on the campus of Dartmouth College, dozens of mathematicians and scientists met for a six-week workshop. They were there to discuss a topic so new and so esoteric, it did not yet have a name. At this Dartmouth Workshop, these top brains debated how to go about creating a thinking machine. The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence gave birth to a new field of science. Less than a century later, that field is poised to reshape the world.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question: What If AI Becomes Self Aware?

The advent of the microprocessor has led to a technological explosion. As the size of computers has diminished, their processing power has increased. The computers that took astronauts to the moon in 1969 filled an entire room. Today, the smartphone in your pocket is millions of times more powerful. That rapid evolution has paved the way for the wildest dreams of the Dartmouth Workshop to come true. In 2023, individuals, businesses, and governments around the world are reckoning with the integration of AI into everyday life. But, before understanding the ifs, hows, and whys of machine self-awareness, we must first distinguish between forms of AI. 

There are several types of artificial intelligence: Generative AI, Traditional AI and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Generative AI chatbots and art generators have exploded into pop culture since 2022 and are becoming a commonplace tool for businesses and individuals around the world. A prompt is input into the AI, which creates content based on the source data to which it has access. Users were initially delighted by the art and text created by generative AI systems. But, as time went on, there has also been backlash, as artists in particular object to how their art has been used to train machine learning models, without compensation.

Generative AI is limited both by the flaws of the humans who create it and the flaws in the data it scrapes - which includes sources such as websites, books, and social media. Studies out of Johns Hopkins and the Georgia Institute of Technology, for example, have found that virtual robots trained on images and captions from the internet can become racist and sexist. 

Contrast that with ‘Traditional’ Artificial Intelligence. Traditional AI requires complex algorithms that specialize in pattern recognition, honing analytics, fraud detection, and data classification. It’s a ‘less intelligent’ form of AI, built to focus on and achieve specific tasks. 

When we think of a machine coming alive, we are talking about AGI. Artificial General Intelligence is an autonomous system that learns, evolves, and ultimately leapfrogs human ability. There are multiple companies and researchers around the world who are seeking to create AGI. 

Both the public and private sectors are falling over themselves trying to use AI to improve operations. The potential uses of AI in Hollywood was a central sticking point in the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, for example. Google is testing AI in cardiac medicine. Wall Street uses AI to get an edge in a stock market where millions can be made or lost in microseconds. American Express has started to use AI bots for customer service operations. Microsoft has committed $50 million dollars to its AI for Earth initiative, which provides tools and offers grants in four key areas: agriculture, biodiversity, climate, and water. AIs of these types are surpassing the abilities of their human architects. Self-improving, independent algorithms already exist. Even researchers who were bullish on the capabilities of AI have been stunned by the rapidity of its evolution. But as society reconciles with what it means to use AI every day, we’re hurtling towards a TIME where AI is as ubiquitous as the smartphone. That begs the question: What does a society suffused with AI look like?

Everyday life will likely involve various types of AIs interacting with one another - each specializing in complex tasks, working together like cogs in a machine. The first level of impact will be seen in the workforce. Millions of human jobs will be supplanted by AI guided robots. In fact, the World Economic Forum estimates that AI will displace 85 million jobs by 2025 - although it will also create 97 million new jobs. Media, medicine, finance, construction, logistics - there is no field that will remain untouched. Some governments may utilize the increased economic output generated by AI to establish a universal basic income. In other countries, AI will add to the growing problem of wealth and income inequality. It could also cause major disruptions to industries around the world, leading to political destabilization.  

Still, it’s difficult to argue against some of the benefits to society brought by Artificial Intelligence. Brown University researchers have been working on robots to help seniors keep track of their medication schedules. Climate scientists think that AI could help us mitigate and perhaps even reverse climate change; some researchers envision a future in which swarms of AI drones reflect sunlight away from our warming oceans. There are also a myriad of applications for AI-run nanobots. In the medical field, AI-run nanobots could turn people into cyborgs, of a sort, repairing our bodies and making humans effectively immortal. Scientists are also finding applications in astrophysics and space exploration. Swiss computer science expert Juergen Schmidhuber at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence envisions a utopian future, predicting that: “AIs will colonize and transform the entire cosmos, and they will make it intelligent.” 

As AI progresses, it’s possible that we’ll see innovations coming at a pace so rapid that it makes the technological revolutions of the 20th century appear quaint by comparison. We could live in ‘smart cities,’ with municipal functions being run by predictive AI. Energy, waste management, public transportation, and utilities may all be delegated to machines, leading to net-zero carbon cities. AIs could also revolutionize recycling, drastically reducing human-created waste. As in “Star Trek”, humanity could be on its way to an AI-driven era of Post-Scarcity, with AI-run machines altering material on the cellular or atomic level. 

But as we’ve discussed, artificial intelligence can also be limited by the biases of its creators. Tech ethicists are fast becoming some of the most important voices in public policy. They and other AI researchers have been sounding the alarm bells about the unintended consequences of the impending AI revolution. They’re pushing for the development of Ethical AI, incorporating ethics and morality into the systems as we build them. A facial recognition AI program, for example, needs to be trained to not discriminate based on race. As more of the world is run on AI, and as AI evolves to the point of sentience, we need to ensure that it’s programmed without bias and with a respect for human life and dignity. Otherwise, we could be looking at a ‘Skynet’ scenario. 

If a machine ever achieves sentience, odds are good that it’ll be an Artificial General Intelligence. After that point, we could see what’s called a Technological Singularity - an “intelligence explosion” in which an AI self-improves in an escalating cycle until it far surpasses human capabilities. Faced with such a superintelligence, we’d be unable to control or reverse it. This is a possibility that several notable scientists, including Stephen Hawking, have expressed serious concern about. 

We don’t know for sure however that the growth of such an AI’s knowledge would be exponential. There may be natural limits to what AI can know and do. For example, some scientists think that AI could be hampered by current limitations in technology. And that exponential increases in intelligence could end up leading to diminishing returns. Still, what we can be sure of is that AI will be disruptive. While tech bros are fond of the phrase, ‘move fast and break things,’ disruption can have plenty of negative knock-on-effects. Even if a superintelligent AI is benevolent, the disruptions it could cause would be immense. Virtually every industry on earth could be remade from the ground up. If human workers were replaced en masse, we would need to consider a Universal Basic Income. Even then, without the need to work, many would begin to question their purpose in the world. Depending on the rapidity of AI’s rise, anarchy could spread around the globe. 

And if AIs become self-aware? The ethical and moral questions multiply. Should intelligent, self-aware AIs be considered ‘alive’? Should we view them as having individual ‘personhood’? What moral principles bind them, and what laws apply? Countries, companies, and the international community would need to debate the question: do machines have human rights? After all, the word ‘robot’ is derived from a Czech word meaning ‘slave.’ 

Humans are affected both by nature and nurture. Ideally, our self-awareness aids us in exercising self-control. If sentient machines are inevitable - as some researchers believe - it’s imperative that we worry about ethics now while they’re in their infancy. For decades, science-fiction writers have feared the overthrow of humanity by our own robotic creations. While anything is possible, such a dystopian future becomes less likely if we ‘raise’ our ‘mechanical children’ with ethics and morality in mind. AI will be disruptive, no question. But as technology rapidly strides towards sentience, we have opportunities and serious issues to answer: will what we create benefit humanity, or lead to more suffering? Will our creations be beholden to us as slaves, or partners who can help free us from our own limitations? All are possibilities, and all could be what happens If AI Becomes Self Aware.