A dive into the post-human era
Often treated as a hypothesis, Singularity, is a point when the technology advancements would be so rapid, generation after generation, stimulating advancement. At that hypothetical point, an explosion in intelligence would take place, called intelligence explosion and machine intelligence would surpass human intelligence.
The debating part of the Intelligence explosion is that it would lead to incomprehensible advancements and recursive self-improvement that would result in human extinction.
As the world is progressing, the humans are connected by digitization, internet information sharing and there is this information age where we are living. Humans are the living paradox for now. The continuous boom in the creation of newer machines has brought humans to the verge of pondering on the question- “Are we creating a path to our self-extinction?” What would happen if machines start doing every work which we used to do? Imagine if all the multinational companies are run by Machine-CEOs. Where will humans go? Wouldn’t that lead to a motionless life? What if machines lead to the inactivity of our brain which would cause ultimate decay of it? Though there are foreseeable advantages that cannot be ignored, we do have looming questions shaking us with its real consequences.
When we visit websites like Flipkart, Amazon, Netflix, etc. we do get recommendations from the machine itself of all the products that we might be interested in. Netflix gives us a list of recommendations for shows that we would like to watch. How is all of this getting possible? The more we search, the more data set is being fed to machines and thus, we are making it smarter than before. And now, nobody likes to visit the mall and then select the products. That selection and human effort are eradicated by machines, leading to an age where we would just feed the digital image of the product and we would get the lists.
Even in the field of banking, we see the role of machines so incorporated and demanding that neglecting its use would be such a disadvantage on the human populace. We interact with chat-bots, do online transactions, and just wait a few seconds for money to be transferred to our friends and families. What if it was not there? Would you wait for your money to be sent by post to a family member who might be hospitalized and would be in an urgent need of money for further operations? Non-conceivable. And thus, to get the greatest benefits, we eradicated numerous jobs for ourselves.
We see the rise of machines even in the agriculture sector where the machines take images of soil and check nutrient deficiencies. (https://youtu.be/89tULyOLLWU). The robots have been taken the role in identifying the growth of weeds and spraying weedicide which was once a tedious task for farmers. This helps achieve 95% efficiency in crop production. (https://youtu.be/-YCa8RntsRE).
The machines have integrated themselves so perfectly in human life like the embedded circuits on a chip-shaped semiconductor that they are so invaluable in the field of healthcare warning patients of heart-disease risks, cardiac arrest etc.
The questions looming over my mind is:
- Will machines ever get that “common-sense” side that is human minds’ uniqueness?
- How is our next decade going to be?
- Will we be the creators of our own extinction? Or is there no foreseeable future of this “hypothetical singularity”?
- Will “plurality” be wiped off by “singularity” in this homo-sapiens world, and would this world be ultimately led by “machine-sapiens”?
