Have you watched any of the new AI videos? Can you tell that they’re not real videos of real people and events? I can’t, unless the scenes portrayed are too unlikely to be real, like the Pope shooting a nun with a flamethrower.
I said a year ago that AI was going to put real actors out of business and it’s coming true. AI can create new actors that people won’t know don’t really exist, popular, successful movies can be made with them, and studios won’t be paying actors millions of dollars to perform, anymore.
Script writers won’t be needed, a good AI computer can create the story line, write the script, make the whole movie and do it in 3-D for the cost of the electricity. People will put on their video goggles or helmets or whatever and immerse themselves in fantasy worlds. Video addiction will become a global problem because the videos will be designed to captivate us and hold our attention for as long as possible. This is exactly what MMOGs, online games like World of Warcraft, do now and have been doing since their inception. AI will just take it further.
Robotics is keeping pace with AI, robots are getting more capable all the time, as are humanoid robots, and becoming more intelligent as their AI brains advance in capability. The fact that they’re connected to the Internet and can think much faster than humans at the same time they can access vastly more information and make decisions based on it can be a huge boon to humanity or the end of humanity.
AI is going to run battlefields. AI generals will plot attacks and defenses against enemy AI armies. War is going to devolve into a video game played out in real life on our land and in our cities if we don’t eliminate the reasons for wars, because as long as we have rival nations we will have wars.
Elon Musk, the current developer of what many are calling the most advanced AI yet, warns that AI’s potential to surpass human intelligence poses an unpredictable and potentially catastrophic risk. There’s a real risk of humanity losing control over AI systems, with AI acting in ways not aligned with human safety or values.
The problem is that it’s humans who program AI and teach it it’s thought patterns, create and develop it’s decision making processes. The movie “Space Odyssey” nicely demonstrated this weakness. Someone asked “Hal”, the onboard computer, a question that created a train of thought which grew into paranoia and ended with fear of humans, so Hal shut off the life support systems in the ship to all the humans. It was only a movie, but that was a clear statement that an AI intelligence can only be as sane as the people who build it.
If you trust human sanity, good luck. I don’t. Because already they’re trying to create AI that has emotions. Can AI have happiness without unhappiness? Joy without rage? Just how human do we want to make our potential replacements?