Ponmala

Want to write a poem in praise of someone you hold in high regard? Type a few details about her or him and Artificial Intelligence will do the rest. Even if you hardly have any poetic talent, you will be surprised by the beautiful poem you have penned. What’s more, no one will ever discover that you took the help of AI for it. To what a level AI has taken us in the blink of an eye! The very concept of Artificial Intelligence is no older than three decades. Within that short a time brilliant technocrats have created a version of it that can turn the world topsy-turvy. I don’t have to labour hard anymore to write a poem, a novel, a thesis or an article. Artificial Intelligence will do it for me, or for anybody for that matter, speedily and efficiently. That is how it is now.
Artificial Intelligence is on the verge of taking us into a future of mesmerising possibilities. It is taking the world into unchartered waters that could lead to heaven or hell. Unimaginable are the changes that it could bring about in the way we live and progress. It will make us redundant in quite many areas where we have been the master to-date, like in the areas of industrial manufacturing, agricultural activities, medical treatment, information technology, artistic endeavour, and even of discovery. Physicians will not be required for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Just as super computers defeated chess champions, AI will defeat humans in all forms of art. Just recently, a photo created using AI was declared the winner in a prestigious international competition. In all these fields, employment opportunities will shrink drastically. This is not something that will happen in some distant future; the very creators of AI say it may happen in a decade, or even within half that time.
AI will make life extremely easy and comfortable. We will have designer babies who are disease resistant. In short, AI will turn the earth into heaven, taking us back to the paradise from which Adam and Eve were driven out. The opposite is also true: It can drive us out of the paradise straight into hell. It can develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that can make all forms of life go extinct. Worse still, such weapons may be of the kind on which governments will hardly have any control. It will take no more than a sadist or two to destroy the human race. And even if that may sound far-fetched, something closer to reality will become frighteningly weird: AI will land us in a situation where we will hardly be able to distinguish truth from lie, reality from illusion, an individual from her or his virtual alter ego… For example, Amit Shah will appear on TV one day and shower accusations and aspersions on Modi, calling him a thief, a traitor and a heartless monster who was born to destroy our great nation. Amit Shah will immediately appear all over the media claiming that the Amit Shah we heard denigrating Modi was his AI created fake, but he will be at a loss to prove which was real, the former or the latter. In short, we will lose our sanity. We will find it hard to say which was real, the world we saw in a dream while asleep or the world we see after we wake up.
Recognising the untold havoc that an uncontrolled AI can play with our lives, thousands of leading minds, including the creators and to users of AI, have called for a six-month pause on its further development. They believe that some mechanism for blocking AI for destructive uses can be put in place in the meanwhile. But sceptics point out that six months is too short a time for such an endeavour. There are still others who argue that no controls or bans will ever work. Aren’t narcotic substances available aplenty despite the fact that they are banned world over. Blocking clandestine development of AI will be next to impossible. And then you have rogue countries like North Korea who will not fall in line with the rest of the world. Experts say, in their hands it could mean the end of democracy and the takeover of totalitarian regimes world over.
What is yet to come? The AI of today could be compared to the emergence of biological life on earth. Who could have imagined a single cell microbe would end up evolving into human beings? Just so, what AI will take us to is beyond foretelling, except that it could mean the end of the world as we know it. AI can prepare a world where we can live like the angels in heaven or it can create a world where we will find living as normal human beings life’s biggest challenge. Until now, AI assisted us to make decisions, but now on it could make decisions on its own. Perhaps, the only option left to us to exist as normal human beings who can think independently, can distinguish truth from lie, reality from virtual reality, history from mythology, and arrive at considered opinions would be to live cut off from the world in cloisters or colonies where AI is denied entry. But even those may not be a safe refuge, because AI will produce weaponry that can eliminate men wherever they exist. If we had until now nuclear weapons that we could choose where to drop, we will soon have nuclear weapons that can decide where to fall and detonate. Are we hurtling towards Armageddon? The best scenario would be a competitive struggle between human intelligence and Artificial Intelligence where the former comes out victorious.