Professor predicts bleak future of war and machines
Artificial intelligence will be a growing issue for humanity in the 21st century, says a Utah State University computer science professor.
“Humanity will be forced to confront the question, do we decide to build these God-like, massively intelligent machines?” asked Hugo de Garis Thursday during a lunchbox lecture sponsored by the department of instructional technology.
In the future, there will be two groups of people: Cosmists, who will support the building and development of artificial intellects (artilects) and Terrans, who will be against artilects, de Garis said.
“Are we going to allow our machines to become smarter than us?” he asked. “Should we stop it? Can we stop it?”
De Garis referred to Moore’s law, which says that technology will double every 18 months, as evidence that advanced artificial intelligence is quickly turning from science fiction to science fact.
“Before you guys are even middle-aged, we will have a technology where we will store one bit of information on a single atom,” de Garis said. “We’re talking a trillion-trillion components, this is what we’ll be having in 20 years.”
As technology becomes greater, humans will have produced machines that are trillions of times more intelligent than themselves.
“Sooner or later humanity is going to have to face up to the idea that, if we choose, we could replace ourselves,” de Garis said. “That’s the broader picture, today it’s still science fiction.”
De Garis predicted that the future would bring a war between Terrans and Cosmists – a war that would result in “gigadeath.” He said tens of thousands of people were killed in the Napoleonic wars and tens of millions of people were killed in the World Wars when technology became greater. In a 21st century war, de Garis said, billions of people would be killed.
“Talking on an issue when the stake has never been so high, the emotional level has never been so high, if you extrapolate up that graph [of deaths in wars] then you’re talking billions,” he said. “I don’t see a way out of this horrible problem, I just see it getting worse and worse.”
De Garis compared the feelings of people toward artilects today to that of people in the past toward the nuclear bomb.
“It is so easy for emotional reasons to just dismiss it, but that’s what happened in the ’30s,” de Garis said. “By analogy, today a growing number of A.I.-type guys are getting worried about the growing number of artificial intelligence.”
In the 1930s, de Garis said, there were a small number of people who could foresee the development of the atomic bomb. People thought the prospect of a bomb that could destroy an entire city was laughable, but reality set in when the bomb was actually developed.
As artilects become more of a reality, de Garis said, the split between Cosmists and Terrans will become more pronounced.
“The Terrans will argue that if the Cosmists build their artilects … you run the risk that these artilects may one day consider humanity a pest and they would wipe us out,” he said. “[Artilects] probably wouldn’t care, they’d be so superior to us.”
De Garis compared it to a human killing a mosquito. Man considers the small insect so insignificant that he can kill it without any remorse. He said that is how it could be in the future with artilects.
Daren Olson, a doctorate student studying instructional technology, argued that while it is inevitable that machines will become more advanced and more a part of our lives, the technology will become part of humanity.
“We are integrating that into who we are and how we operate,” Olson said.
De Garis said there is the prospect that technology and humans will become one, creating cybernetic organisms, or cyborgs.
“Personally, I think the cyborgian solution will only accelerate the contempt of the Terrans for Cosmitism,” de Garis said.
He gave the example of a baby being born and having a sand-grain-sized chip implanted in the child’s head, with the chip containing far more capacity than the human brain.
“That baby is no longer human, it’s an artilect,” de Garis said.
De Garis asked the 19 people in attendance whether they would be Cosmists or Terrans. Ten said they would be Cosmists, seven Terrans and two didn’t vote.
As for de Garis?
He said, “Obviously, I’m Cosmist.
“Humanity, sooner or later, is going to have to take it seriously,” he said. “As the stakes get higher, as there’s more and more to lose, the probability or accepting [the future] goes down and down.”
-str@cc.usu.edu