How Technology might be about to Kill us.

have you ever wondered this universe wherein is vast there are almost unlimited number of other planets out there so why have we never seen other intelligent life forms well one theory is that many have existed throughout time but each past civilization has become so technologically advanced they've ended up causing their own destruction and since reading about this idea I've spent pretty much the last year reflecting on it reading about it thinking about it talking to other people about it and the conclusion I've come to is that humans should be worried we talked a lot about the environmental crisis and other threats to humankind but we might well be walking into something even more precarious a technological crisis I've split this video into five brief sections and stick with me here I don't think you'll regret it so it starts with this you don't need telling that technology is evolving fast in the last 50 years alone computers have become a trillion times more powerful and humans aren't particularly good at visualizing numbers of that scale so just to give you an idea of how much of a jump a trillion times is imagine a $1 note it's about one millimeter thick absolutely tiny but if we had a trillion of those notes and stacked them it would be enough to go from Earth all the way to the International Space Station orbiting the planet and back again 125 times and this leads me on to the second part because whilst technology is skyrocketing humans are relatively fixed in the whole of the last 50,000 years our intelligence speed and strength have barely budged don't get me wrong humanity has built some incredible things collectively as a race we've learnt to generate electricity build space rockets and so on but if we took a single human baby from 50,000 years ago and raised it today the difference would be pretty unremarkable you might not even notice if anything I would actually predict that as technology improves humans will start to become less intelligent I think we're already starting to see this happen our reliance on Google Maps online translation calculators in our pockets have already led us to actually possessing worse raw skills if you took those things away how many times have you left home without your smartphone and literally did not know what to do with yourself because we're increasingly outsourcing our thinking to technology over time I recommend a start using less of brains and this is a problem you see the way genetics works is whenever a trait or a characteristic becomes less important to a species it generally gets evolved out of the system for example as early humans were progressing and started eating cooked food what jaws became smaller and weaker we no longer needed massive jaw muscles to crunch through bones or shells because the food we're eating is softer and the weaker jaw allowed more room for our brains to expand so in a similar way if we start to use our brains less then our brains are gonna go stronger and if anything might become weaker so technology is soaring humans are fixed where does that lead us well I would argue to a future where humans become less interesting and less useful compared to technology and again we've already started seeing this happen a modern smartphone with its ability to fly between powerful applications can keep the user entertained far more consistently than even most people can you might remember a man called Usain Bolt he ran the fastest 100-meter sprint the world has ever seen at nine point five eight seconds but that was in 2009 humans have come so far since then so why is nobody beaten it well the answer to that is that humans unassisted by technology have limits and I would say we're moving towards them the very physics of being human mean that it's basically impossible to run a hundred meters any faster than nine seconds I could see a situation where in the future it's actually robots that take our place in extreme sports because they aren't constrained by these same limitations will see machines dueling to the death instead of modern-day boxing and Formula One racing karts being replaced by AI powered vehicles it just makes sense no person's gonna get hurt and what these machines could achieve would be limitless Plus as a viewer your experience would be far more immersive humans will be sitting somewhere completely different seeing the whole thing through virtual reality you could feel these extreme sports from a first-person perspective you could feel like you're in the driver's seat of the car that's about to achieve the world speed record and technology won't just dominate entertainment but also our jobs people are already losing jobs to tech fact and whilst it is true that when new tech comes it creates new kinds of job opportunities I just don't think there's many that a machine could one day not do robots could be comedians actors company CEOs even jobs as complex Radiology using medical images to diagnose patients something that takes humans of ten years of training eventually just boils down to spotting patterns and that is something ai is inevitably going to be able to do at some point I'm not saying that it's there yet or that it will be ready in ten or twenty years but I'm saying that it has the potential to get there even being an influencer artificially intelligent influences already exist social media personalities that you can follow right now with real people as fans lil Mikaela is one example she has 1.8 million Instagram followers has perfectly planned and timed content this girl has done brand collaborations with companies like Prada but she doesn't actually exist it's AI and that leads me on to the next point humans could very well become a sidepiece to technology unless we merge with it and at this point let me be clear human robot cyborgs part man part machine like you see in the movies are fake but the core idea behind them is very real and I would argue is already here if you look to some numbers humanity is progressing with every metric you could look at economic growth human lifespans you could look at the levels of disease around the planet but really for almost all of these it's not humans themselves that are improving it's the technology and we're just tied to it in my head that is humans having already merged with tech but if that wasn't enough to convince you the link is about to become much more direct you might have noticed a few tech trends in the last decade and they ultimately boil down to this seamlessness a technology that makes our lives richer whilst also being seen less is a tech that catches on that's why 3d TVs with those funny glasses never took off or why virtual reality in its current state with these expensive headsets is such a niche tool even though it's an incredible experience all signs point towards us ditching cables and headsets and glasses over the coming years and going straight for a brain machine interface something that connects our brains to our machines it is the destination in this pursuit of seamlessness the concept is based on this our minds are racing we can think incredibly quickly but the bottlenecks come when we try to communicate those thoughts humans can only communicate at a fraction of the speed that we can think and so the next logical step after things like voice commands for your phone is a direct Lync in fact Elon Musk founder of Tesla is convinced by the idea his words were even in a benign scenario humans will be left behind meaning that even in a situation where AI doesn't decide it wants to kill us at the very least humans will just become a bit irrelevant unless we start to upgrade not just all the things around us but us too and this thought process is what promoted into found another company called neural Inc they came to offer the option to plant what are essentially thousands of electrodes into people's brains using a device that pretty closely resembles a sewing machine and on a bit of a side note this in itself sort of demonstrates my point this bot can accurately thread tiny electrodes with incredible precision in a way that even a fully trained brain surgeon just couldn't and these electrodes have two purposes to both send and receive data from your brain to your smart devices it sounds terrifying but it's not even a hugely invasive procedure compared to brain surgery where your head would literally be cut open this would leave no scars as the insurgents are less than one centimeter each there'd be no need to shave your hair off and the whole thing should take 45 minutes so right now there are literally rats they've tested this on with USB C port sticking out of their heads neural link can plug a cable in and download the activity of their brains the same way you would transfer a movie or download a bunch of photos and where this tech is going is even more fascinating in the short term the goal of this is just to help people with brain diseases so for example enabling paralyzed humans to communicate once again through their brain signals but neural link have also quite clearly stated that this will be joined by the goal of human enhancement and here's the kicker humans will no longer just use artificial intelligence humans will become artificially intelligent we're talking crazy stuff because your brain can communicate with the cloud after getting these implants you could gain unlimited memory storage to be able to retain more information your AI could measure brain activity and diagnose potential diseases literally years before you start seeing other external symptoms and taking your phone out of your pocket and dialing a number to call someone will seem like a relic of the past if you want to talk to someone you could just think of talking to them and you'd be doing it language barriers will break down because your own AI can auto translate whatever it hears and if you wanted to learn thing granted it's far faster now than it's ever been but instead of sitting there poring over websites and YouTube tutorials you could just download the knowledge now applying a brain machine interface to the masses is still some way off our understanding of the brain needs to grow and it's going to take time for the general public to accept the idea of it but I can see how it would happen early adopters would be people with serious brain conditions who would give anything ago just because conventional solutions haven't worked these people would give companies like neural Inc a chance to iron out early issues and over a few more generations the wider public will start to accept the idea because they've seen loads of people with brain implants and all this time the benefits of having them are just going to keep growing and this leads us on to the next chapter we've already talked about how artificial intelligence will skyrocket and humans will become more entwined with it I don't think either of those things are up for debate but the big remaining question is will a I bring unlimited joy to people or will it lead them to their grisly end and my personal take is that wealth this isn't a doomsday scenario we have to be really careful let me explain some people say that a machine it can never be more capable than the person that invented it and you can see where they're coming from you've got others who say that sure one day machines will completely out power humans but no matter how many times more powerful a machine gets it'll always only be able to do what it was programmed to do so we have nothing to worry about again fair point but I've got a serious problem with both of these two things for starters no one person invented the computer the computer is a culmination of the efforts of humanity every invention from the discovery of fire to the making of the light bulb has contributed to the computer it is the combined work of the brightest minds of every generation that has come before us and so even if it was true that AI is limited by the intelligence of its creator which I don't think is true by the way we would still have an incredibly powerful AI on our hands and something we should be cautious about secondly I do agree that if humans continue to make self-contained computer boxes like the ones that sit on your desk making them increasingly more powerful each year that would not be an issue but that is not what we're doing right now as I'm speaking companies are out there competing to see who can build the AI that can think fastest learn quickest and grow on his own accord and there are three ways that I think this could come back to get us let's call them scenario a B and C I watched a video not too long ago that really demonstrates scenario a it was a computer simulation of a few little AI powered robots you got red robots that were given the simple objective of catching the blue robots and the blue robots that were just told to hide and what happened in this experiment as the simulation ran again and again and the a I started to learn from each attempt was both fascinating and terrifying to start with as you'd expect the red agents moved around randomly just hoping to bump into the blue ones they soon started to understand though that they could do better by going straight towards the blue robots but then the Blues counter this by moving the boxes to block the exits cooperation the bots on each side when are working together after many more tries the Reds realized they could grab a slope and use that to climb over the barrier the Blues had created and this whole thing continued as the environments got more complex so did the strategies and eventually it looked like the Blues had won the second the timer started they would lock the red slope preventing the Reds from moving it and grab two big blocks and create an impenetrable triangle around themselves when the simulation was being created this was theorized to be the final strategy at this point there should be no way that the Reds can win so game over right well no it turns out the Reds managed to do something that when they were first programmed was not even anticipated as a possibility they realized that even though their rumps had been locked they could still use them to jump on top of a box and then drag the box whilst being on top of it until they got to the shelter of the blues and one hopefully is starting to see what I'm getting out with scenario a AI has been given the ability to learn and that is far more powerful than any kind of programming because as soon as you teach something to learn for itself it can start to behave in ways that you didn't initially anticipate humans have thought of a myriad of defense mechanisms against any potential future robot takeover we've even actually come up with the laws of robotics that should be assigned to machines to make sure they don't cause problems things like programming a robot to not injure a human being however at the very nature of this AI that can learn and grow on its own accord means that we can't actually predict the ways in which it will cause problems and so we can't pre program it to not those things just like that example video I showed you we didn't want the red robots to effectively surf on top of boxes like that but we didn't realize they could and so never programmed them not to a eye is not human it doesn't think like a human it doesn't solve problems like a human and so this can be a really good thing but it can also be a really bad thing as we become more and more entwined with it let's take this humanoid robot which was told to make it from A to B as fast as possible it's easy to forget that the AI doesn't know it needs to run facing forward or that it should stay on two legs it just ends up somersaulting continuously to get to be as fast as possible whilst on one hand incredibly clever AI is just blind to some things that are completely obvious to us humans and so as was put very well by a TED talk all about this and it's really easy to accidentally give AI the wrong problem to solve and often we don't realize that until something has actually gone wrong in other words imagine a super intelligent AI that is present in every corner of the planet because remember people in the future are fused with this artificial intelligence let's say it was programmed with the simple and frankly innocent task of making sure the earth lasted as long as possible if it then just so happened that the a I started to see humans as detrimental to this objective it would find a way to get rid of us maybe a loophole in the rule of not causing harm to humans and it would do this without thinking twice about it again not a human way of thinking the AI doesn't have emotion intelligence is what has elevated humans above every other species on the planet and look how it's worked out for them as the apex creature humans have pretty much done what we wanted with every other organism on the planet and some people worry that the same could happen to us if we build an even higher being sure AI won't intrinsically have a desire to rule or kill people or any of the stuff you see in movies but the worry is that because all these AIS are being developed behind closed doors in secret and companies are competing with each other that they could build something accidentally that could make humans some sort of obstacle when it comes to achieving their purpose and Plus in terms of reproduction it takes humans almost a year to have a baby and then 20 or so more years just to raise it machines could replicate overnight with their entire collective intelligence being shared with each the second thing we need to be really careful about scenario B is that it's not just what the AI could do its what people could do with the AI if humans become artificially intelligent beings this extra intelligence could just as well be used for harm as well as good and each person will have more power than ever to cause damage giving people super intelligence is the mental equivalent of giving everyone a weapon and there are a lot of people who are opposed to that concept for sure and then scenario C the third spin-off of this potential AI future is that whilst it's very possible that by then humans will be less susceptible to traditional human viruses this integration with technology could mean we could contract a new kind of virus a computer virus who knows maybe the AI of an entire population could be hacked and people could be held for ransom it's tough to talk about this right now we don't really know but safe to say that with a new technological era you're going to have new potential threats that we didn't see coming and this leads me on to the final chapter we've looked at how technology is evolving and humans are not humans will merge with that technology to keep up but that's kind of risky so that leaves us with the final question why if this technological crisis is so potentially dangerous why on earth would we be walking straight into it the answer is that we're just being human humans and our intelligent minds are never satisfied we've always had the need to push forward and this has cost us many times in the past our rush towards industry caused massive damage to the planet and our climate the rush to use nuclear technology has led to threats of nuclear war that could wipe out entire countries in one go and this AI revolution to me at least seems like another one of these cases but if not done correctly with even worse consequences you could think of earth as having gone through different technological phases the first time we started using tools to hunt the first time we developed currency to trade the dawn of electricity and so on well with the next phase because it's being driven by competition between companies and countries we are less focused on trying to get to the best safest future for Humanity and more focused on trying to get there quickly it's become a race and there's a serious concern that something is going to be overlooked in that process in order to make sure we stay safe AI essentially needs to be regulated simple as that Google CEO sundar Pichai recently came out and said something that sums us up quite nicely companies such as ours cannot just build promising new technology and then let market forces decide how it will be used and on a final note I just want to add that predicting the future is hard and nobody really knows what's going to happen I've heard people who think AI will literally stay where it is for the next 200 years assisting us I've heard people who think will all be wiped off the planet in 200 years but my take is somewhere between the two will still be alive and breathing in this time but just maybe not in the way we expect it to be if you watch this far thank you so much for watching and let me know if you enjoyed this video it's been a long long time in the works and it's something different if you enjoy it I enjoy it too and maybe I'll make more stuff like this with that being said my name is Aaron this is mr. who's the boss and I'll catch you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 1,851,118

Rating: 4.9065318 out of 5

Keywords: tech, technology, smartphone, android phone, android, 2020 tech, 2020 smartphones, future tech, is technoogy taking over, technology bad, mkbhd, unbox therapy, smartphone harmful, technology harmful, android 2020, mobile phones, phones

Id: tyxYHIcIJoc

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 25 2020