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Artificial intelligence, could it really lead to the extinction of humanity ?

 For my EMA (in french) I had to write my dissertation about Artificial Intelligence.

At first, in my research of gathering evidence together, there was masses of information on News sites at the time, about the amazing benefits to mankind in terms of medical assistance, diagnosing serious illnesses, as well as AI in Education or AI for the handicapped, with virtual assistants that can help make all our lives a lot easier.

Then came the bad news!  News that AI could actually be sinister and could be used for bad purposes in the world. I went from feeling euphoric to being extremely worried!

There were the daily news headlines such as;

"Geoffrey Hinton - a man widely seen as the godfather of artificial intelligence - quit his job, warning about the growing dangers from developments in the field, which enables technology to create images or text that are barely distinguishable from the work of humans."

So AI is an existential risk for humanity?

Some of the top creators of AI are urging caution about the future risks of AI. Some academics and industry experts have warned that the pace of development could result in malicious AI being deployed by bad actors to actively cause harm - or choosing to inflict harm by itself."

(BBC)

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war" (reads AI safety.)

But surely AI is a useful tool to have? Humans programme these machines to do good and to benefit humanity.
The machines after all just respond to whatever it is they have been programmed to do don't they?
It is a machine not unlike any other a typewriter or a washing machine for example?

Since then I have learned about the many disadvantages of AI, such as the huge ammount of job losses caused by AI. This taking away of peoples livelihoods and their way of life. This will be detrimental to people, because as humans we all need occupations that we enjoy doing, that provides us with a decent standard of living.

All these redundancies brought about because a robot can do the job quicker for less money! so it makes the company richer while making the people poorer. What a shame that is, but not really surprising in todays greedy capitalist system!

What are the other risks?
Prof Bengio, who has joined AI safety calls for AI regulation, said he did not think militaries should be granted AI powers. 

Remember we are often influenced by science fiction, which can later sometimes become science fact! (Think Terminator!)

At the end of the day it's just  another technology and experts have always exaggerated new technologies and  inventions as scientific breakthroughs to sell us their products.

However, what the worrying thing is, is that the web is linked to AI and every AI is linked to the web from the smallest computer and robot to the largest intelligent machine.

What about bad actors and cyber attacks, those who could hack the system for bad purposes?

But the Centre for AI Safety director Dan Hendrycks told BBC News future risks and present concerns "shouldn't be viewed antagonistically".

"Addressing some of the issues today can be useful for addressing many of the later risks tomorrow," he said.

Personally I think that the greatest risk to humans, could come from the flawed nature of other humans beings themselves. We should celebrate the achievements of AI ! while at the same time putting together the safeguards needed for the protection of the security for future generations.

References
BBC News: AI 'godfather' Geoffrey Hinton tells the BBC of AI dangers as he quits Google
By Zoe Kleinman & Chris Vallance

Wikipedia.org
Existential risk from artificial intelligence.