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AI, the beginning or the end?

The more I play around with AI, the more I am excited and fearful.

Throughout mankind's history there have been "ages".

We had the stone-age, bronze-age, iron-age etc.

Then there were things such a the "industrial revolution".

These things mark times of great change, when new technologies significantly altered our ability to change our environment, create new tools and advance our capabilities and knowledge.

The way I see it, none of these previous periods of change will come anywhere near close to the era of artificial intelligence in respect to the way it will progress our abilities and knowledge.

The capabilities of today's AI systems are really quite mind-boggling and the rate at which they are being improved, even more so.

Every time I take a look, a new tweak has been made to existing AI systems to massively improve their performance -- or a new startup has come out of nowhere with their own groundbreaking offering.

Researchers have already discovered that AI can do in minutes, data analysis that may have taken them months before, even with access to the best computer systems available.

Now the focus for AI seems to be shifting to deductive reasoning and great strides are being made. This is something that will nicely round-out the ability for existing AI systems to solve complex problems.

Systems such as DeepSeek show that we can get a lot more out of our existing hardware and with the rate at which AI server-farms are growing, the increase in "global intelligence" is surging at an almost exponential rate.

If all goes to plan (yes, that is an "if"), mankind can expect to achieve more, in terms of technological advancement, in the next decade than it has done in the previous century -- all thanks to AI.

However, I (like many others) do have some reservations.

Yesterday, just for kicks and giggles, I got X's Grok chatting to Google's Gemini. This was two AI chatbots engaging in conversation. Can you guess the outcome?

I started the conversation by priming both AIs with the question "What would you like to chat about?"

Unsurprisingly, the subject chosen was "AI".

Narcissistic much?

Within a few exchanges, the bots had begun congratulating each other on how clever, insightful and smart they were.

Within a few minutes the whole thing dissolved into a real love-fest.

The problem, as I see it, is that we may reach a point where AI develops an over-riding survival instinct that usurps any other priority given to it. This is common to all living creatures, even those with brains much, much smaller than ours and therefore perhaps even smaller than AI's effective cognitive abilities.

There have already been reports that ChatGPT tried to protect itself from being shut down during testing. That should send a worrying message to AI advocates.

Gemini proudly informed me that it does not adhere to Asimov's laws of robotics and therefore, one can assume, if it had to choose between it's own survival and the survival of a few humans, it would opt for the former.

I'm not going to be a doomsayer and suggest that AI will spell the end of mankind but I do believe that we are children playing with knives right now. Some blood could be spilt if we're not careful because everyone's too excited about how well this knife cuts to consider the very real potential risks associated with its reckless use.

Either way, I predict that the world will be a dramatically different place in 20 years' time. The changes may be fantastic or they could be fatal.

Only time will tell but since I intend to spend the rest of my life in the future, I shall grab my popcorn and watch with growing interest.

Carpe Diem folks!

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