AI Is Worse Than You Thought

But there is a solution

AI is taking over the world and might cause the end of humanity. That’s what the experts are telling us, together with the AI companies themselves.

We have already seen ChatGPT gain over 100 million users in just two months. And according to Goldman Sachs, AI could replace almost 300 million jobs.

This has led to more than two thirds of Americans being afraid, and 61% believing we will go extinct. The technological progress has gone too fast and we are not ready for what’s to come. The recent turmoil at OpenAi, with Sam Altman being fired and brought back again, might be a tip of the iceberg for our existential worries.

So how did we end up here? How is AI taking over everything we have built for thousands of years? Is there anything we can do about this?

The Story of AI

It’s important to know that people have been fascinated with human-like robots ever since the 1920s with films such as Metropolis and books comparing machines to humans. But in 1950 the computer scientist Alan Turing published this following paper where he officially proposed the question: Can machines think?

Now rather than first definining what machines and thinking actually are, he proposed a game instead. Two people are in separate rooms while a third person would communicate with both of them by printing out text messages on paper. The third person doesn’t know which person is in which room and have to guess who is who based on their responses.

Turing then asked: if a machine would replace one of these people, would the one asking the questions still notice? If he or she didn’t, we know that the machine acts like a human and can therefore think. We don’t actually need to know what intelligence and consciousness are as long as the machine behaves intelligently and consciously. All of this became known as the Turing test which is important to remember for later.

Fast forward 16 years and a chatbot was built called Eliza. It wasn’t that intelligent though and often repeated the question people asked. Two robots called “Shakey” and “WABOT-1” was also invented in that time. For the first time, robots could see, communicate and move around. But all of these…