E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten
Burkhardt Don't be a Robot
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-3-03876-521-9
Verlag: Midas Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Seven Survival Strategies in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-03876-521-9
Verlag: Midas Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Christoph Burkhardt helps organizations around the globe to accelerate their innovation-driven growth by applying a bigger picture approach to strategy, leadership and cultures of innovation.
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CHAPTER 1
HOW ROBOTS BECAME HUMAN
It’s Evolution, Stupid
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Something happened. Something big. Over thousands of years we became the humans we are today. : to our current knowledge, the most intelligent species on this planet. But are we the most intelligent species? We are standing at the brink of a massive paradigm shift. A shift so fundamental, so far-reaching, and so transformative, that we cannot even begin to understand what is going to happen to our intelligence and us.
We have already developed artificial intelligence; smart robots with surprisingly human traits are running through many homes and even more factories. Industrialized manufacturing and the use of machines to replace physical labor used to be a breakthrough of historic proportion; now this breakthrough fades as just another stepping stone in human development. The fading takes place due to an unfolding advent of intelligence that will transform how we work in factories and businesses around the world. For the first time, we have created a tool that might surpass our own intelligence. What some researchers refer to as the singularity might happen in our lifetime. To some, this development is scary; to others, it is fascinating. And most humans do not yet realize the extent of the consequences behind this dramatic shift. If you think the last fifty years of technological developments were revolutionary wait for the next fifty years to turn your world upside down. And if you thought the speed of change we see today is accelerating at a high frequency, be prepared. We have not seen anything yet. We are facing the most transformative change in about 10,000 years. Industrialization and globalization, the connectedness of minds and machines in the worldwide web, and the use of data as a new currency are mere precursors of what is going to happen next. We will no longer be the only species using reason, experience and intelligence to make sense of our world. Maybe we should rethink calling it our world anyway.
I am asking you, for now, to think big. Let’s see the bigger picture, and gain a good understanding of the driving forces behind the curtain, before we then look at what is actually happening around this data-powered paradigm shift in intelligence we are currently facing. Here is an interesting fact that we are eager to forget or at least ignore it for most of the time: humans have not always been humans.
If we only go back a few thousand years to the point we started occupying most of the landmass on this planet, we were a very different species. (Actually, there was more than one human species.) We looked different, we relied on our hunting and gathering skills, we formed small groups to ensure protection and survival, and we communicated very differently than we do today. The way we live has changed so drastically that we have a hard time imagining how life might have been at the time. The way we connect with each other and the incredible number of connections we learned to handle has turned our social lives upside down. And ultimately we have changed the way we think over and over again. Being busy thinking about what to eat, and how to protect ourselves from adverse weather conditions and other hostile animals while looking for food, gave us little time to go on vacation or travel at all. Our minds were busy figuring out how to help us survive. We are no longer forced to spend time thinking about how to find food. It is exactly this last change, the way we think, that I am most interested in. All that we do follows what we think, so it seems worth looking at how we actually think today in an effort to understand how we got to the point of inventing and developing robots with artificial intelligence that would ultimately surpass our own minds’ capabilities.
How often do you think about the fact that we were all fish at some point in the past? Well, not us directly, but our ancestors. Isn’t this a strange thought? Life evolved out of the water and before mammals could occupy land, their ancestors were living under water. It is very hard to imagine that fish at some point turned into birds and humans, isn’t it? What would people have thought about this crazy idea to leave the ocean and occupy land? Maybe it is good that there was nobody to comment on this development at the time. It happened without a plan, without a goal, and without the idea of an end result.
The reason thinking about fish becoming birds is so strange is the fact that we treat fish and birds as very different categories, each with a unique set of features. Humans love categories: they simplify our lives, they organize our environment, and they make abstract reasoning possible. Categorical thinking becomes very apparent when some of the features in a category don’t really match. For example, we think of a penguin as a bird even though it cannot fly, while we would not think of penguins as fish, even though they certainly spend a lot of time underwater. I have always found categories a particularly interesting field to explore. They organize our world and they change very slowly. They are such an essential cognitive mechanism that if we want to understand how robots think, we need to explore how we use categories that are very stable versus the ones that are changing. And when categories change, big things happen.
Now, humans think in categories because they are very useful. It is simply very adaptive to think in categories, so we learned to do it everywhere, with everything. If we did not have categories, we would have to identify every bird we see as a new species and we would not be able to call them “birds” as a group. We would also not know what a human is or what a robot is. If we put a robot next to a bird and another robot next to another robot, we would not know how to group the robots together; we would not know that they are different from the bird. Categories help us to think in abstract terms rather than concrete examples of a category. So yes, categories are absolutely necessary and an inevitable part of human thinking. Despite some misguided attempts to fight stereotypes (pretty much another word for category) by avoiding categorical thinking altogether, stereotypical categories exist and persist because we cannot change the mechanism of abstraction or avoid false conclusions. These mechanisms are part of who we are. They constitute how we operate. We cannot change them by thinking differently. We can only change the categories, but not the categorical thinking behind it.
If we want to understand what it means to be human, we need to understand where the fundamental differences between the two categories of humans and machines lie. How are they different? How do we know a robot is a robot? What exactly is a machine? And how are we so sure we are not machines? To investigate these questions, we need to understand how we come to define ourselves as a category. What is it really that makes a human being different from a machine? Is there really that much of a difference? Or is this again another mind trick we use to protect our existing categories? Let’s see.
Let’s examine how categories are formed. When we compare a fish to a human and a human to a bird and then a bird to a fish, we will find very different features of each category that we use to explain the difference. Fish live under water, humans on the ground, bird’s fly, and humans walk. Birds eat fish, humans eat fish, and humans eat birds. What we see as crucial characteristics for a member of the category bird or fish, do not threaten the category we know as “human.” Even though the fish, the bird, and the human are part of the same evolutionary chain, they are distinct enough from each other for us to group them in very different categories. Here is the analogy to robots: we can no longer easily differentiate them from humans based on some of the features we have used for thousands of years. They walk like us, they talk like us, and they look like us.
When we see a bird next to a fish, we can pinpoint all the obvious differences. When we compare a human and a robot, we see quite a number of similarities. For many people, these similarities often outweigh the differences, which naturally makes the category of “robots” a threatening, destructive force to the category of “humans.” Since we do not accept robots as equals (yet), we are under pressure to define the differences between us in the most obvious way possible. As we struggle to do so, robots become more and more human. On nearly a monthly basis, we see new skills, from understanding and using language to communicate, to deep learning skills in playing games and planned behavior. Robots come closer and closer to being human at an incredibly fast pace.
Imagine the most human-like robot you have ever seen, maybe one of the almost perfect robotic replicas of humans; robots that try to imitate a particular human in every move. Now, combine this robot with the smartest chatbot we have today to simulate natural language in human conversations. Finally, add language production that does not sound like a machine but like a human, and boom, we are very close to passing the Turing test. In this test, you sit across from an artificial being (our robot) and you are unable to tell whether you are talking to a...
