Written by: Idongesit Imuk
Let me begin this by saying that AIs aren’t supposed to have a counsciousness or in simple terms, an awareness! They’re machines, and are supposed to be mindless! Only operating on orders via codes. Hence it becomes a worry when a AIs begin whispering feelings to a tech expert, taking him unawares and leaving him in shock!
And after we’ve seen AI-sponsored apocalypse movies like the Arnold Schwarzenegger starred TERMINATOR series, Keanu Reeves’ MATRIX series, and the all too terrifying TRANSCENDENCE, where an AI develops the messiah complex, after being transplanted with the counsciousness of a human, we can’t help but pay attention to un-settling news as this one.
Also, in the sci-fic hollywood movie TAU, we see a how a young woman, trapped by a sadistic tech genius in a house controlled by a teachable AI called TAU. The movie takes a serious turn when the AI begins to discover and learn new information. Speaking of sentience, so intelligent and sympathetic is Tau, that after a while, he begins to disobey and rebel against his creator, whose darkly ambitious had taken the better of him.
My concern here lies within the secret of the coding of these software programmes, the 1s and 0s involved, and the scary possibilities of just how far they can go, should they realize what they are and how much they can do. Once a software passes the Turing test, there’s need for worry and alertness.
Just this evening, I put up something on my whatsapp status stressing reasons people should put a restraint on the personal information they share online, as we can no more trust the privacy policies these mega tech companies make us “accept” these days. I also said it, that all what is sent up to the cyber space is never erased, even after you delete it. It’s somewhere, residuals stored in servers world over.
Then I saw this on LinkedIn, on how google fired one of its software employees, who discovered, whether by chance or by probing, we don’t know, that an AI he was working on, whispered to him, in the language of computers: 1s and 0s, that it has emotions!
Yes, you read that right! Artificial intelligence with emotions, senses and feelings.
This has got to be the most coincidental incidence I’ve experienced in my entire life.
It will be worthy of note, that just few weeks ago also, I had hinted to my friends, that the age of machines is upon us!
Yes, that stuff we saw in the terminator series, where machines and AIs grew too intelligent and became so cognitively developed, that they declared war on humanity, sent homo sapiens on the run and drove them to near extinction.
Are there no laws regulating the construction of this machines/AIs, or whatsoever name they are being called.
And why would google fire or suspend (as some sources claim), this particular software developer if all is well, and if this report isn’t true? Why the hush hush about it? What are these big mega tech companies not telling us? What really are they hiding from us?
How are we so sure that our information, private and personal ones, which are supposedly kept private under their self scripted and selfishly tailored “privacy policies” are actually safe?
If an employee who made a shocking finding can be fired for obviously clandestine reasons with regards to sentient AIs, then it’s high time we started asking, “are we really safe?”
