Artificial Intelligence and Replacing Humanity

The word Luddite has been misappropriated to simply mean people who fear change brought about by computers, robots, and the like. It was a movement early in the Industrial Revolution because people were afraid of losing their jobs to machines. Today, there are many speculations about Artificial Intelligence and what will happen. Will robots and AI take over and either destroy or enslave humanity? Not hardly! There has been a spate of material on this subject recently, and I have assembled some of it for your education.

Human, robot, and artificial intelligence, Pixabay / Gerd Altmann

A very old joke involves people in an airplane hearing an announcement informing the passengers that the flight was completely automated. The computer recited how wonderful it was, then the announcement ended with the reassurance, "Nothing can go wrong <click> go wrong <click> go wrong <click>..." The joke shows that people are suspicious of computers, robots, and AI. Fears and concerns existed long before science fiction stories.

I use text-to-speech quite often, including when I listened to the upcoming featured posts. (Does that qualify as ironic?) Anyway, TtS has come a long way from its early days, and the voices available in the Microsoft Edge browser are very, very similar to human voices. When listening closely, one can discern that it is not a human doing the speaking, but a voice based on a person. I wonder if Natasha, Emma, Guy, and Michael are the names of people who are foundational to those voices?

Manual laborers back at the time of the Luddites onward were afraid of losing their jobs to machines. Machines have eliminated some jobs, but new jobs were also created. Meanwhile, people in more creative occupations were less concerned about their financial safety. New developments have made them sit up and take notice.

However, AI chatbots and art programs have become more and more complex. Recently, ChatAI has been in the news. Its bot, named Assistant, is able to paraphrase statements in different voices and complexity levels, write poetry and lyrics, and even create computer programs. Other programs create art in response to prompts. Could these programs replace human writers, artists, and musicians?

To read all of our first installment, click on "Will AI Replace Writers and Artists?" Don't go to far, things get more interesting.

A short piece by Derek Hunter (I do not know if he is even a Christian) supports the above article. He tested ChatGPT to determine if it could take over his writing job. The result was adequate, but did not have humor, nor did it show soul. Basically, it was dull. Read his article at "Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Ready To Replace Us Just Yet." (For that matter, I feel that modern music seems largely mechanical and has no soul. When will performers be replaced by AI — mayhaps half of them are already.) Then come back again for the rest.

Dr. Jerry Bergman had some things to say on this subject, so he wrote two articles. The newer of them appears first.

Remember that like with all computers, AI is limited to its programming by humans. While some may think this and transhumanism are the next stages of human evolution, they are actually arguments for intelligent design. Humans make machines that do certain tasks faster than humans, but machines and AI have severe limitations. People can ooh and ah at AI performing tasks, but programmers should realize just how complex the human brain — what they are trying to imitate and surpass — really is, and the genius of the Master Engineer.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is much in the news now. AI has helped us to learn about, and appreciate, the complexity of the human brain. Essentially, AI refers to the ability of a computer to perform tasks that are similar to those produced by human learning and decision making. Nonetheless, scientists are learning much about the limits of man-made machines from research on what is misnamed “artificial intelligence.” Although the computer’s processing power is called “intelligence,” its output is totally dependent on the programming and design produced by well-educated humans. One fact we are learning from AI research is that the human brain is vastly superior to the best computers used by our most eminent scientists working at the leading research institutions while using billions of our hard-earned tax dollars.

The rest of this is found at "We’re Safe from an A.I. Takeover." Come back for the one that I think pulls all this together.

When humans use the minds that God gave them, they can build machines and artificial intelligences of limited capabilities to better our lives. Groovy. Open up a typical computer and throw a bucket of water on it and you end up with a large doorstop; it can't recover. If programming is off or the demands change, computers and AI are stymied because they are unable to adapt. Indeed, I have to use some HTML when writing posts and articles. If I have certain keystrokes out of place, it causes problems for the page you're reading.

The human brain has ways of adapting, as is seen in people such as the anomalous woman who discovered at age twenty-four that she had no cerebellum. Also, the brain can reroute and do some amount of self-repair, especially when people are younger. AI may seem to learn and adapt, but it is limited to its programming. The brain has far more memories than computers have hardware memory space available. When AI wins chess games, it is using trial-and-error process that resembles learning. God made our brains, and they are far superior to electric stuff that people built.

The progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has been significant in the past decade. It is so significant that its supporters claim that solving certain problems with AI is as fast as humans. The AI system called

DeepMind, has developed an artificial intelligence that can solve tasks it has never seen before as fast and as accurately as humans.

In other words, highly trained PhD level researchers from leading universities, including MIT, Harvard, and the University of California, Berkeley, along with multi-millions of dollars in funding, have developed AI to achieve what was unimaginable a few years ago.

The journey continues by visiting "Why the Brain Is Superior to A.I." As a bonus that shows how AI can be tainted, you may like "Artificial Psychotic Intelligence."