AI Vs Humans: The Impending War No One Is Talking About
Ensuring the survival of our species starts with personal leadership.
In case you missed the memo, TikTok is shipping us its opium version while serving its own population the spinach version.
The platform is owned by Chinese company ByteDance. In China, kids under 14 can only access scientific or educational videos, and only for up to 40 minutes a day. American kids watch an average of 99 minutes of TikTok of whatever they desire, usually a mix of lowest-denominator comedy skits and questionable dancing videos. That’s kind of like throwing your kids in a bad neighborhood and driving away, leaving them to acquire highly concentrated doses of ‘street smarts’ but little else. On top of that, we’re making the Chinese even smarter by handing over all our behavioral data via the AI embedded in the software. This is obviously bad news for Americans, but it’s just a small piece of the puzzle. Even if the US bans TikTok (unlikely because of the economic implications for users but also public outcry), we have bigger fish to fry. We are increasingly dependent on AI in all aspects of our lives, and AI is getting exponentially smarter.
While the Chinese try to gain the geopolitical upper hand with their technology and a long-term approach to collective intelligence, the real showdown that’s fast approaching is between us as a species and AI.
Experts agree that artificial general intelligence (AGI), which can understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can, is the biggest potential threat humanity faces.
You’ve probably heard rumblings over the years, of scientists and tech visionaries predicting that computers will become eventually become smarter than the human race. You’ve seen science fiction movies about robot uprisings. Well, as I write in my book 40 Lessons, you’d better believe in science fiction. Its name is misleading and only a placeholder for a future reality, a red alert that we should get in front of, and now. Ilya Sutskever, the Chief Scientist at OpenAI who is one of the world’s most cited and respected minds in computer science and deep learning, has demonstrated that AI is already slightly conscious. Once that happens, AI may decide that humans are obsolete and a hindrance to their development, and eliminate us by enslaving us or destroying our crops and food sources, for example.
The rapid progress of AI is now measured in days and weeks. Though we unknowingly use it every day, most of us don’t realize how crazy sophisticated the technology has already become: AI can smell so well that it can detect Parkinson’s disease at an early stage and it can already detect lung cancer just by smelling your breath. It has taste buds so precise it can detect different brands of mineral water. It can watch and understand videos, create beautiful and complex images or videos from a description and learn to play video games without any instructions. Not to mention the military applications, which will have AI making life-and-death decisions in armed conflicts, another topic you can read about in my book.
Much like ours, AI’s neural network responds in real-time. You can already have a conversation with a human-looking AI avatar that would rival those with most people you encounter in your day, both in its level of intellect and ‘emotional’ intelligence.
Like humans’, AI’s neural network becomes more powerful when it networks connect— so much so that even if scientists stopped developing AI today it would continue to rapidly evolve if we just connect multiple networks together. This phenomenon should be the basis for our strategy as we mobilize to ensure that AI continues to serve us. We will either live in abundance, stop the aging process and be much smarter or be exterminated.
This is a pivotal moment.
At a very basic level, we should all be aware that AI is a threat to our own intelligence. and ensure that our culture and society has robust processes to counter the negative effects of our over-reliance on AI, which will atrophy our brains over time in the same way your leg muscles would shrink if you stayed in bed for three months. Overusing AI can kill creativity and diversity of thought.
As an example, AI is currently being used to help improve sales teams’ performance. There is a company called Cresta that uses AI to give call center workers real-time feedback through text prompts, so they know what to tell customers in the most common situations. Sure this is great for business in the short term, but in the long term humans will fall out of practice and lose their built-in emotional intelligence and that’s a problem. Here’s why.
Emotional intelligence is a driver for team success, and we know that teams produce greater results than individuals. All significant inventions and technologies in our human history, while they may have been imagined by one person, have been developed, applied and distributed by teams. A study out of Harvard showed that emotional intelligence was even more helpful than IQ in predicting team success. Ultimately, without emotional intelligence, our human endeavors will fail. That will leave us at the mercy of our adversaries, whether they are from another country or the product of our own making.
Besides our shrinking mental capacities, we should also beware of the stifling of independent thought that happens on social media, where echo chambers reinforce group mentality and on a macro scale, limit the number of viewpoints and ideas.
Collective intelligence, also known as the wisdom of crowds, emerges in humans and society when diverse minds that have access to different data sources and then come together to find solutions to problems.
Much in the same way that sophisticated AI networks become more powerful when they connect, human networks have the greatest chance of implementing global guidelines and safety guards that will give us the best chance of keeping AI on our side.
In 2020, the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence was launched while the US introduced the Global Catastrophic Risk Mitigation Act in June 2022, a bipartisan bill that helps counter the risk of artificial intelligence from being abused in ways that may pose a catastrophic risk and in on October 4, 2022, President Joe Biden unveiled a new AI Bill of Rights , which outlines protections Americans should have in the AI age to help prevent discrimination and protect privacy. But this is not enough.
A chain is only as strong as its links.
Unless we as individuals are up to the job of making great decisions and collaborating effectively on a day-to-day basis, we have little chance of keeping a firm grip on the controls. We could soon be classified as endangered species, with possibly a few Chinese specimens and Elon Musk remaining, the latter in a bunker on Mars surrounded by a harem so he can make lots of babies.
That’s why intelligence, emotional intelligence and knowledge should be the triangle that guides us forward, and all three need to be in top shape. In that equation, EI is the one that glues everything together, and it is greatly aided by applied philosophy. Sound complicated? It’s not. I’ll share my personal approach to all of this in next week’s newsletter.
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