Will AI be the end of humanity?

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is the fastest growing company in the history of capitalism. In 2022 Sam Altman, the wonderkid CEO of OpenAI, described prospects for AI bluntly: “The good case is so unbelievably good you sound crazy talking about it. The bad case is, like, lights out for all of us.”

He’s not the only one predicting AI could end badly for humanity. Alan Turing, one of the great scientific minds of all time, up there with Newton and Darwin, wrote the first scientific paper about AI in 1950. A year later, he predicted that once machines could learn from experience, “it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control.”

Another of the founding fathers of AI, Marvin Minsky, told Life magazine back in 1970: “Once the computers get control, we might never get it back. If we’re lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets.”

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If we’re lucky. So how might machines outstrip us? Irving Good, who worked with Turing at Bletchley Park, predicted that machines would at some point become smart enough to improve themselves, triggering an unstoppable cascade of ever-increasing intelligence. A snowball of super-intelligence rolling downhill. 

Good called this “the last invention that man need ever make”. But might it be the last invention humanity ever makes? Given recent progress on AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini, many think the singularity could arrive soon. Over $1 billion is being invested in AI every single day. That’s a quarter of the world’s total R&D budget. We’ve never bet this big on anything.

Elon Musk predicted machines will outsmart us this year. Dario Amodei from Anthropic says 2026 or 2027. Shane Legg from DeepMind: 2028. Jensen Huang from Nvidia: 2029. These are uncomfortably close dates for a potential apocalypse. Of course, not everyone agrees. Yann LeCun (until recently leading AI at META) thinks it might be decades away.  

Read more:

• Artificial Intelligence is no match for the human heart
• How ChatGPT and AI changed the conversation on universal basic income
• Why AI quiz makers like ChatGPT are no match for human ingenuity  

Before I wrote The Shortest History of AI I wrote another titled 2062, predicting AI would exceed human intelligence in about 40 years. That was a few years ago and, based on recent progress in AI, I might update the title today to 2042. 

So whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic about the AI race, computers will likely match human intelligence in our children’s lifetimes, and possibly even in ours. And once they match our intelligence, they’ll likely surpass it. It would be terribly conceited to think otherwise. Human intelligence is just an evolutionary accident. Computers calculate faster, remember more, never forget, and already dominate chess, reading x-rays and folding proteins.

But there are three good reasons why I don’t fear super-intelligent AI.

First, intelligence will bring wisdom and humility. The smartest person knows how little they know.

Second, we already have super-intelligence. Human institutions – corporations, governments – already possess greater than human intelligence. No one person knows how to build a nuclear power station or an iPhone. But the people working at Westinghouse and Apple collectively do. This collective super-intelligence hasn’t ended human affairs. In fact, quite the opposite. 

Third, competition keeps intelligence in check. The eight billion human intelligences on the planet compete against each other, and that prevents any one intelligence from dominating. Apple and Samsung compete. Politicians and ideas compete. 

So please don’t worry too much when you hear intelligent people warning about the existential risk of AI. Intelligent people assign a little too much importance to intelligence. Hang out at a university and you’ll see intelligence’s very real limitations.

Indeed, I welcome the arrival of AI that is smarter than us. It will accelerate science, transform education and liberate us from work that is dirty, dull, difficult and dangerous. I reckon it might even enhance our humanity. Human relationships will become more valuable.

Our super-power isn’t actually our intelligence but our society. AI might compose music like Bach or write sonnets like Shakespeare, but it won’t speak to human experiences such as love, loss and mortality.

I’m not underestimating the challenge we face. There are certainly many issues you should worry about. The AI bubble bursting. The impact of AI on jobs. And the corrosive effect of AI deepfakes and an AI mediated world of information and misinformation. To name just three problems caused by AI that will increasingly trouble us. 

One way or another, it’s going to be a wild ride.

The Shortest History of AI by Toby Walsh is out now (Old Street Publishing, £9.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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