In the movies, when an Artificial Intelligence surpasses human intelligence, it always tends to react in the same way: plan for world domination.
However, there are 12 possible scenarios that could occur if this ever happens.
From utopia to dystopia
Max Tegmark (Stockholm, 1967) believes that artificial intelligence can present similar risks and opportunities for humanity. This MIT professor and director of the Future of Life Institute in Cambridge (USA) estimates that the arrival of an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that surpasses humans is a matter of decades.
As he explains in his book Life 3.0: What it means to be human in the age of artificial intelligence, that we already reviewed recently, depending on various factors, this new paradigm shift (a human invention that thinks better than humans) pcan trigger at least twelve possible scenarios.
Some are very interesting, others idyllic… but others seem downright like a dystopian science fiction nightmare. They range from peaceful human-AI coexistence to AI takeover, leading to human extinction or imprisonment.
- There is the benevolent dictator (a single benevolent superintelligence would rule the world)
- He protective god (Humans would still be in charge of their own destiny, but there would be an AI protecting and caring for us)
- The libertarian utopia (humans and machines would coexist peacefully)
- The dominators (AIs destroy humanity).
- He zookeeper (a few humans would be left in zoos for the entertainment of AIs, just as we keep endangered pandas in zoos)
- He Enslaved God (superintelligence created in isolation that is used by its human masters to create unimaginable wealth and technologies).
- The Egalitarian Utopia (here AI guarantees a basic income to all human beings and private property rights have also been abolished).
- He Guardian (an AI is created to interfere as little as necessary to prevent the creation of another AI).
- The Descendants (AI is like a parent pretending that humans aren't doing so badly.)
- 1984 (progress is restricted by an Orwellian surveillance state),
- Back (Civilization is extinguished because technology is boycotted to return to a pre-scientific era).
- Self-destruction (AI is never created by some technical stumbling block and civilization collapses)
We explain them all in more detail in the following video:
If you'd like to dig deeper into each scenario, we also recommend Max's TED talk:
What do we want the role of humans to be if machines can do everything better and cheaper than we can? The way I see it, we face a choice. One option is to be complacent. To say, "Let's build machines that can do everything we can do and not worry about the consequences. I mean, if we build technology that makes all humans obsolete, what could possibly go wrong?"
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The news
The 12 scenarios in which we could live if Artificial Intelligence surpasses humans
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.