- Science HowStuffWorks
VIVA – An expert thinks artificial intelligence (AI) technology has a 50 percent chance of wipe out humanity. Max Tegmark, a physicist and AI expert at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has given a deeply worrying prediction about our future on this planet.
According to the academic, history has shown that Earth's smartest species, humans are responsible for the death of 'lesser' species, such as the Dodo.
Therefore, if and when AI becomes smarter than humans, the same fate could easily await us, he warned. We will not know when our demise at the hands of AI will occur, because a less intelligent species has no way of knowing.
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Professor Tegmark made the bleak remarks during an interview in his native Swedish by the national broadcaster SVT.
About half of all other species on earth have already been exterminated by us humans, he said.
He also added: "Because we were smarter, they had no control. What we are warning about now is that if we humans lose control over our society to machines that are much smarter than us, then things can go just as bad for us,"
Professor Tegmark is one of the signatories of a single-sentence statement published this week that warns of the risk of extinction from AI.
The statement reads: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."
Some of the world's top scientists think that in the near future, AI could be used to create autonomous weapons or robots that could kill with or without human intervention.
But even seemingly benign AI software could make decisions that could be fatal to humans if the tech is not programmed with enough care.
Back in 2018, Professor Tegmark warned that humans could one day become enslaved by the intelligent machines they create.
He even claimed at the time that some of his colleagues might welcome the extinction of the species by AI, viewing them as our natural offspring.
Another point of view is that keeping this form of 'superintelligence' under human control is 'like an enslaved dog'.
"But you might worry that we humans aren't smart enough to handle that much power," he said in the TED talk.
Aside from the moral qualms one might have about enslaving a superior mind, we should be more concerned about the possibility that superintelligence could outsmart us.
CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk is one of the most prominent names and faces in tech development and is very outspoken when it comes to the power of Artificial Intelligence
In March, Musk and 1,000 other tech leaders called for a pause on the 'dangerous race' to develop AI, which they fear poses 'great risks to society and humanity' and could have 'catastrophic' effects.
