AI Is The Final Human Invention: Will It Bring Peril or Prosperity?

 Economist William Nordhaus once calculated that our ancestors spent approximately 58 hours of labour to generate the same amount of light that’s now produced by a modern lightbulb in an instant. By the 1700s, oil lamps cut that figure to five hours of work for one hour of usable light. A significant jump in productivity, but activities like working or reading at night were still reserved for the wealthy.  

Today, a single hour of work buys decades of light. The jump has been staggering. In money terms, the price of lighting has fallen 14,000-fold since the 1300s – an hour of light today costs well under a second of labour. That’s what productivity looks like. 

And yet, even this enormous leap may pale compared to what’s coming. Artificial intelligence promises to do for productivity what electricity, the steam engine and the light bulb once did. Except this time, it will be faster, broader and even more disruptive. Some researchers believe AI will propel us into prosperity so vast we can barely imagine it. Others warn it could end the story altogether. Alarmingly, a survey of key AI researchers returned a 5% chance that superintelligence could wipe us out entirely. That’s a one-in-twenty chance that its development will trigger “extremely bad outcomes, including human extinction”. 

The paradox is fascinating. Artificial intelligence may be the invention that frees us from drudgery forevermore – or it could be our final mistake....<<<Read More>>>...