Last year Stephen Hawking made the bold prediction that one of the greatest threats to humanity is artificial intelligence. With the influx of drones and the continued advancement of technology, humanity could enter into the science fiction world of I, Robot and AI, among many other similar films and books. The theory suggests that at some point we will create machines that are able to “evolve” faster than we are. They will rapidly advance through “their” ability to produce more intricate algorithms while we will continue to be “stuck” in our slow evolution. Of course, the result is that a new artificial intelligence race will conquer the world.
Now, perhaps Hawking and others like Elon Musk prove to be right and robots will overrun the earth. Perhaps the next era will be one dominated by artificial intelligence. However, I’m not terribly concerned with that here. My concern is not about some future AI outbreak. I’m much more concerned with the fact that we’ve already succumbed to the overtaking.
This vide was going around quite a bit recently…
Amongst a crowd of people while being physically present for live entertainment, these young women were consumed and controlled by their technology. And as anyone can see, this is humorous only because we are all these women. We text while driving (hopefully not!), check social media when there’s a moment of silence, interrupt a one-on-one conversation because someone somewhere in the world just sent us a text that we have to get to, and we read blogs (you should be ashamed).
Artificial Intelligence is already here. The problem is that we are the ones that are “artificially” intelligent. Our intelligence is so artificial that we don’t even realize that we’ve been taken over. The threat is not somewhere “out there.” We’ve missed that it’s already taken place. And for proof, just go anywhere at any time where other people are and see how many people are under the influence of technology’s power. There’s a good chance we’ll miss it because no one is posting about it on Facebook. But, if we do look up and notice everyone else looking down, make sure to take a selfie and post it on social media.
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