Has the world already been ruled by intelligent machines?
On October 9, 2015, a big fight took place in a small hall in London. A man is on one side of this battle. But his opponent is not human. He is a silicon machine. In other words, it is a computer program. This battle is part of a larger intellectual war. This battle is one of the most important battles in world history. To know how this battle is important for the future existence of humans, we have to go back to history. Let’s talk about that now.
Man is a physically very weak creature. Think about it. If we remove all the physical things that man has like weapons and clothes, the things that man can do are very limited. At least it is difficult for a man to run with a hound. Intelligence is the most valuable weapon for a physically weak man. By using intelligence, man has managed to dominate the earth.
In the past, man tried to fulfill his physical needs by using his intelligence. For example, they made weapons to protect themselves from animals. Houses were built to protect from sun and rain. Vehicles were made for transportation. In this way, man used his intelligence to fulfill many of his physical needs.
Humans are very lazy creatures. Due to that, they tried to assign the work they do with intelligence to a machine. Because man thought that it could be a great convenience for human society.
Before giving intelligence to a machine, man had to understand exactly what intelligence is. There is no exact definition of intelligence yet. Even today there are many debates about what intelligence is. According to most Western scientists, intelligence has 9 main parts. These 9 parts are different aspects of intelligence. Let’s see what those sections are.
1. Logical thinking
2. Ability to draw conclusions from given data
3. The ability to plan something
4. Ability to solve problems
5. Intuition
6. Ability to learn different things
7. Ability to create art
8. Ability to understand concepts
9. The ability to understand one’s own and other’s feelings
The beginning of this happened in the year 1642 with the production of the first calculator. This is the first incident in which man handed over the first section of intelligence, the logical ability, to a machine. Here, man understood that calculators make calculations much more efficiently and faster than man.
The second aspect of intelligence is the ability to draw conclusions from given data. This sector started to be handed over to machines around 1950 with the development of a weather forecasting machine called Eniac. This machine has been able to predict the weather more quickly and accurately based on the given data. It has improved a lot now.
I will explain it with an example. The Cray-XC40 machine in England can collect 14,000 trillion data from thousands of centers in one second and can conclude about the weather anywhere in the world. Think about how fast this machine is. Not only that. The weather forecast made by this machine is 90% correct.
Not only the weather. Agriculture, energy generation, water supply, transportation, military strategies, medicine, etc., have been entrusted with making decisions based on data in many areas. The reason is that machines can do this work more efficiently, faster, and more accurately than humans. Another good example is the world market, the most important place in the commercial world, where decisions are made by machines. However, these artificial intelligence programs can only do one job. That means the Cray-XC40 machine can only make weather predictions. It can’t do or learn anything else. But currently, artificial intelligence programs have been developed that can learn new things on their own. Google Deep Mind is such a program. I’ll talk about that in a bit.
Due to the ability to analyze data in this way, the ability to plan something, which is the third section of intelligence, can be done very successfully by artificial intelligence. And so is the ability to solve problems, which is the fourth sector. Artificial intelligence has provided solutions that are difficult for humans even to imagine.
Until 2015, people believed that artificial intelligence was not capable of acquiring intuition, the fifth section of intelligence. Intuition is the ability of people to feel something intuitively. For example, some mothers may take it as an intuition to be aware of their children before they are in trouble. This aspect of intelligence cannot be properly explained by science. So man believed that artificial intelligence would never be able to acquire intuition. But after an intellectual battle that happened in a small hall in London on October 9, 2015, the man began to doubt whether his belief was still valid.
There is an ancient game in China called “Go”. A man named Fan Hui is a world champion in the game “Go”. He was the human player who participated in the battle that would take place that day. His opponent was artificial intelligence called “Deep Mind” developed by Google. The game of “Go” is an extremely complicated game even more than chess. I will give a little explanation about the game “Go”.
In the game of chess, there are a limited number of ways a player can move pawns at one time. You can count the number of ways. Therefore, chess is mostly a game based on logic. But in the game called “Go”, the number of ways a player can move at one time is unlimited. The number of methods cannot be counted and finished. A player who plays the game of “Go” does not do so based on logic. He plays it the way he feels it. In other words, by intuition. So man believed that the game “Go” could never be successfully learned by a machine.
To test this, on October 9, 2015, Fan Hui and Google Deep Mind, an artificial intelligence program, played the game “Go”. So what do you think happened? Google Deep Mind beats the world champion Fan Hui continuously. Fan Hui was shocked by this incident. It is mentioned in the reports that he walked outside for a few minutes to calm his mind. Because Fan Hui has never lost like that before. He has previously played “Go” with artificial intelligence programs and won. Before the start of the competition, he said that he would beat Google Deep Mind artificial intelligence within a few minutes. But he had to face an unexpected event. Therefore, after this incident, the man had to admit that the field of intuition has also acquired artificial intelligence.
At the same time, man realized that artificial intelligence is more successful than human intelligence in the ability to learn different things, which is the sixth aspect of intelligence. Google Deep Mind artificial intelligence is a good example of that. Google Deep Mind is a general-purpose artificial intelligence program. It is a holistic artificial intelligence program that can learn by looking at anything.
The artificial intelligence program called Google Deep Mind has been taught the game “Go” in the same way. A number of videos playing the game “Go” have been shown to Google Deep Mind artificial intelligence. At least no law of the game “Go” is given as data. It has learned on its own by watching videos. Artificial intelligence took less time to learn this compared to humans. Let me explain it with examples. Fan Hui, who became a world champion in the game “Go”, had to train for many years to reach that state. But it took less than a year for artificial intelligence called Google Deep Mind. Google Deep Mind artificial intelligence was able to learn the game “Go” within such a short time and defeat even the world champion. Google Deep Mind artificial intelligence learned the game of chess within an hour and defeated the chess world champion.
Next, let’s look at the ability to create art, which is the seventh section of intelligence. I don’t need to tell you more details about this. Artificial intelligence programs that can create excellent paintings have already been released for the use of the public. Leonardo.ai Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion are some examples of that.
So what do you think? I feel that the supremacy of intelligence, which made the human race the most important creature in the world, is gradually being lost from man. Not only me, but many scientists who are investigating this situation are already asking about this.
You may think this is not a big problem. Because nowadays machines are under the human. But thinking like that is not completely correct. Let me give you an example. This incident happened in 2010. Decisions in the world market are made by artificial intelligence. One day these artificial intelligence programs will come together and decide to reduce the price of natural gas. Within seconds, artificial intelligence programs reduced natural gas prices for no apparent reason. After about five minutes, the price is raised to the same price as before. This is called Flash Crash 2010. It is still not possible to explain why this happened. The inexplicable reason is the complexity of artificial intelligence. Although man created artificial intelligence programs, man cannot explain how an artificial intelligence program learns on its own.
One can think that humans will be invaded and conquered by artificial intelligence machines or robots like in the movies. But in my opinion, the probability of a violent invasion like a war is very low. But I am of the opinion that there is an invasion that we cannot see on the surface.
I will explain it. Humans need the help of artificial intelligence to maintain and develop the world at this level. Not only help but in some cases, we have to hand over control to artificial intelligence machines. We are already doing it. This is a development with no turning back. So my fear, in this technological development, how will artificial intelligence see humans?
I mean something like this. Imagine that we are going to build a new big building. As the first step, we level the land using machines. When doing this kind of work, we don’t think about the ant colony in that land. It is not out of hatred or anger towards the ant colony. This is because ant colonies are not important. The purpose of making the building is more important to us than taking care of the ant colony. So I say this. Will artificial intelligence make humans look like a colony of ants when they make decisions about the future of the world? what’s your opinion?
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