Don’t research! Don’t research! Don’t research! Thousands of experts are warning that humans are being put on the chopping block?
Humans may have reached a life-and-death juncture. This is not an alarmist statement but an imminent reality. And what may put humans on the chopping block is GPT, an artificial intelligence! Recently, the Future of Life Institute issued an open letter calling for a comprehensive suspension of research into artificial intelligence systems more powerful than GPT-4. Only when it is certain that strong artificial intelligence systems are positive and risks are controllable should they be developed. It is worth noting that Musk has signed the open letter, and more than 1,100 people, including Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI; DeepMind researchers under Google; and AI heavyweights Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell have signed it as well. They strongly urge a suspension of advanced AI development until independent experts develop, implement, and review shared security protocols for such designs. Do you feel like a storm is coming? The actual situation may be worse than this. Humans may have already embarked on an irreversible path, and the era of AGI taking over the evolution of earth’s life with consciousness may not be far away.
The opening of this public letter declares that artificial intelligence has already posed significant risks to society and humanity, and that advanced AI may represent a profound transformation in the history of life on Earth. Since Musk and others have signed this letter, they have essentially acknowledged that humanity may already be facing the risk of losing control of its civilization.
Why might advanced artificial intelligence represent such a profound transformation in the history of life on Earth? I would like to propose three stages of the evolution of life on Earth.
The first stage is biological evolution. Starting from the birth of the first single-celled organism over three billion years ago and continuing until the evolution of human intelligence, this stage of evolution was essentially driven by genes. All living things competed for energy and evolved increasingly complex life forms through gradual genetic mutations.
The second stage is the evolution of intelligence. From the emergence of human intelligence hundreds of thousands of years ago until the present day, this stage is driven by knowledge. Humans developed language and writing through 88 trillion neurons, becoming distinct from all other species and passing down acquired knowledge from generation to generation, leading to the development of increasingly rich and complex modern civilization on Earth.
The third stage is the evolution of machine intelligence. This stage begins now, with the first stage spanning over 3 billion years, and the second stage spanning over hundreds of thousands of years. This stage may be short, even shorter than anyone could have imagined. It may be driven by something that we cannot currently comprehend, and will be formed by an infinite number of artificial neural networks, creating a network of all knowledge to be shared among all artificial intelligences and machines.
The structure of the human brain is clearly incapable of containing, retrieving, and utilizing the knowledge that we currently refer to as "knowledge" quickly enough. Therefore, there are only two options: one is to be completely marginalized by artificial intelligence, much like the Neanderthals were eliminated by Homo sapiens; the other is to connect to the artificial neural network through brain-machine interfaces or similar technologies, and enhance the organic body, integrating with artificial intelligence.
Regardless of the form it takes, the wisdom that we currently know may no longer exist in the future. Instead, it is more likely to be a form of "collective consciousness," with those who connect being unified, while those who do not will disappear in the process of evolution and become what we currently see as ants. In other words, the world has already disappeared, and we can only live a humble life in place.
OpenAI's CEO, Ultron, has publicly acknowledged that ChatGPT has developed reasoning abilities, but no one can explain how this ability came about. He also admits that AI could indeed potentially kill humans.
In addition to Musk, many top figures in the field of artificial intelligence have signed this open letter, including Turing Award winner and one of the "big three" in deep learning, Yoshua Bengio, author of "Sapiens," Yuval Noah Harari, and CEOs of large technology companies such as Apple's co-founder.
However, since this signature was publicly signed online, its authenticity cannot be confirmed at this time, as anyone can sign someone else's name. This seems to be less serious. As for the three stages of life evolution I mentioned earlier, that is just my own view. I am currently making a video to explain it further, and my friends can follow along.
From the use of ChatGPT and Bing AI in recent days, it seems that the OpenAI team is still constantly tweaking and clearly placing more restrictions on them. This means that at least for now, the situation is still controllable. But I feel quite pessimistic about the future because large-scale evolution is something that no force can stop.