One glance at the state of things and its evident humanitys evolved itself into a corner.
On the one hand, were smart enough to create machines that learn.
On the other,people are dying in Texasbecauseelected officialswant to keep the government out of Texas.
Chew on that for a second.
What we need is asuperherobetter villain.
Independence Day
Humans fight.
40% off TNW Conference!
The rational end game for humanity is self-wrought extinction.
Whether via climate change or mutually assured destruction through military means, weve entered a gridlock against progression.
Luckily for us, humans are highly adaptive creatures.
Theres always hope well find a way to live together in peace and harmony.
But the entire history of humanity is evidence against that ever happening.
We are violent and competitive.
After all, we have the resources to feed everyone on the planet right now.Were just choosing not to.
Thats why we need a better enemy.
Choosing ourselves as our greatest enemy is self-defeating and stupid, but nobody else has stepped up.
Were even starting to kick the coronavirus ass at this point.
Or… killer robots
Just to be clear, were not advocating for extraterrestrials to come and exterminate us.
We just need to focus all of our adaptive intelligence on an enemy other than ourselves.
The only solution was optimization.
We optimized and solved the problem, thus creating an acceptable output.
The real problem
Humans are often evil, bigoted, and full of malice.
But were still people.The real problemis that aliens wont just cooperate and come attack us.
We cant control aliens.
In fact, its possible they dont even exist.
Aliens are not dependable enemies.
We do, however, have complete control over our computers and artificial intelligence systems.
And we should definitely start teaching them to continuously challenge us.
The current paradigm for AI development is creating things that help us.
And maybe doing so in a void is whats hurting us.
Our soldiers use AI to help them fight other humans.
Our teachers and business leaders use AI to organize classrooms and workplaces.
Some of this is good on its surface, some of its supposedly for the greater good.
We should be developing artificial intelligence that challenges every one of us in tandem with life-saving and life-affirming AI.
Take the domain of Chess,for example.
Theres no further question whether humans or AI dominate the Chess board.
And thats a good thing.
For centuries weve used Chess as an analogy for war strategy.
Humans obviously crave challenge.
We compete for sport and for fun.
The overall goal would be to create a system by which tribalism is replaced with cooperation.
But, with concentrated redirection, maybe our passion for adversity could become a strength for our species.
Maybe we need an AI adversary to be our Huckleberry when it comes to the urge for competition.
We dont need killer robots or aliens for that.
Will Smith could not be reached for comment.
