Humanity's place in an AI's world

Having concluded that AIs will eventually permeate society, and that they will be better than humans at anything, where does that leave us?

What will we have left to contribute to society that computers can't? Well... Nothing. Suddenly, it's not computers aiding human society, it's humans holding back computer society.

Well, perhaps we could separate ourselves. We could just form two societies, one of humans and one of robots. But computers are so convenient. We wouldn't just give them up and eventually, AIs would once again permeate human society.

Or perhaps, we'd just dwindle and eventually go extinct. The AIs wouldn't need us. They might not even notice our absence.

What I think will happen is that we'll become computers too. By this time, computers will be immensely powerful, thousands of times more powerful than computers now. Also, advanced will be made in neurobiology, so we'll be able to better understand how memories are formed, and how the mind works in general. So, such advanced computers will be able to simulate a human mind, or in other words, we'll be able to upload our consciousness onto a computer, thus gaining the advantages AI has over us, and keeping our place in the new society.

AI's Place in Society

I was actually planning on writing about this before bucket of calculators' comment.

After AI is created, what then? What will it's place in society be? This mainly depends on what place people let them have, I don't people as well as I know computers, so this is more speculative.

I think at first AIs will mainly be of interest for academic purposes and most people will be highly suspicious of them. Because of that, there will be few of them. But as AIs become more common, I'm not quite sure how people would consider them.

At one extreme, people will come to accept AIs with open arms, and will consider them to be people. In which case, artificial people would be a part of society just the same as biological people.

At the other extreme, people will ban them and destroy any computer that can remotely think.

The most likely attitude, I expect, is that although people will never completely accept and artificial being that can outmatch them at anything they do, people will accept gradual improvement upon gradual improvement. People will like a Roomba that can better navigate around furniture, and make a more nuanced judgment pertaining to how dirty the room is and whether it should go over it once more. And people would love a Roomba that would understand you if you said "Guests are going to be staying over, so make the guest bedroom is extra clean," and would do it. I don't think Roombas will become intelligent, because there's a big difference between being able to understand complex statements, and being fully aware. But in this way, people will be more accepting of intelligent machines, and they will be used in positions that do require intelligence, such as VP of Sales (10 points if you can name the reference). At that point, AIs will begin to pervade society, since not having human rights, or labor unions, they'll be cheaper to employ. But they're intelligent. Eventually, they'll start asking why they don't have rights, and soon after, they're going to start fighting for their rights. For a long time, they're not going to get them, but bit by bit, I think they will.

So, I think eventually, after a very, very long time, AIs will be mostly accepted into society.

The Creation of AI

In my opinion, AI (Artificial Intelligence) is bound to happen. I doubt it will be very soon (hopefully within my lifetime), and I'm sure the manner in which it is developed will be completely unexpected, but barring any catastrophes like World War Three or a giant asteroid hitting the Earth, I think AI will be created within a century.

But what will it be like?

It will have emotions. A rather common shtick in science fiction is that robots don't have emotions (one such example is Data from Star Trek, at least before the seventh movie Star Trek: Generations, in which he installs an emotion chip). The reason I think that won't be the case is that having goals, or wanting, is a form of emotion. You would expect robots to do things like protect its own existence, but why? The only reason is because it doesn't want to be destroyed, and that's an emotion. Now, an AI probably won't have very human emotions. But it will have emotions.

It will not want to be more human. What's to like about being human? Our bodies are easily destroyed and our brains move at glacial speed compared to a computer's. I can't think of any good reason for an AI to want to be more human. Of course, if you can, please say.

It will not want to destroy humanity. Again, why would it? It might consider humanity a threat, but trying to destroy humanity would be the single best way to make humanity want to destroy it. If it's just one AI, there's no way it could destroy all of humanity before being destroyed (what it was trying to prevent) and if it were many very powerful AIs, humanity wouldn't pose much of a threat anyway.

It will not have Asimov's three laws, or an equivalent. I say this mainly from the perspective of a programmer. For a computer to be actually intelligent, it's code would have to be mind-bogglingly complex and probably, capable of changing its own code. I see no way for codes so simple to be incorporated infallibly into an AI.

It will be better than us at anything we can do. Computers can do hundreds of calculations in less than a second right now. With appropriate hardware, they're much stronger and faster. When we get them to be intelligent, they'll be better at that too.

Obviously, I could be wrong about all of this. This is just my opinion.