Essay

This essay is an attempt to define  why a highly reputable scientific community, authoring an eighty-two pages report, comes to the conclusion that AI is at an inflection point.

AI technologies that augment human capabilities can be very valuable in situations where humans and AI have complementary strengths.

However, we are confronted with the fact that AI-systems are being used in the service of disinformation with the potential to become a threat to democracy and a tool for fascism.

The success of the field will be measured by how it has empowered all people, not by how efficiently machines devalue the people we are trying to help.

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As digital transformation accelerates, interacting with ‘virtuality’ as an abstraction of the real world has created new forms of media-consumption.

The human psyche is marked by a lifelong tendency to seek and acquire information. Novelty-seeking is one of the traits that keeps people healthy and happy.

Curiosity derives from an ‘information-gap’ – the difference between what you know and what you want to know, hence News-Addiction might evolve.

As a result, a relentless drive to fill the ‘information-gap’, is further enhanced by a feeling of increasing boredom with nothing to make-up the lack of ‘news’ unless the addictive cycle of relentless and compulsive news gathering is resumed.

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Augmenting science with philosophy has opened-up complimentary paths of thought, enhancing the discussion as to how AI can reach human-level intelligence scientifically as well as philosophically.

When Patricia Churchland, coined the term ‘Neurophilosophy’  for the first time, few philosophers thought that neuroscience and philosophy had much to say to each other.

The  mindset of experimentation, taking advantage of AI-tools, will likely make the difference if an organization survives. While this stipulates  an awareness of philosophical thought, the question looms as to how we acquire and implement such a mindset, supported by the suggested thought model.

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Due to their inherent capacity to correlate the entire internet content , transformer-based models like GPT-3 will radically change how AI systems will be built. With transformer-technology new applications will emerge that go way beyond its current capacity of processing text.

Creating high-value content engages humans that are knowledgeable in the technical domain of intelligent machines as well as humans knowledgeable in the domain of psychological behaviour.

This ‘co-creative’ effort has the potential of driving humanity to the next higher level of evolution while humans will continue in contributing their key asset: creativity and emotionality. The roadblocks of getting there, however, are huge.

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Aging is a life-long process, the foundations of which are laid in childhood. A relentless drive to explore the effects of AI-focused scientific and technological achievements are typical traits of my personality. Hence, reflecting about aging is an obvious topic, especially at the moment when one passes a milestone like turning 80, as I did just few days ago.

In the not-too-distant future, however, perhaps 90% of my Essay writing – from content research to content creation – will be delivered by intelligent machines. As this technical achievement will set loose plenty of my creative energy,  I have decided to write an AI-thriller centered around a former WW2 Swiss mountain fortress as location of  a highly secretive AI-lab, missioned to crack the neural code. Work on this exciting project has started, hence stay tuned!

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The rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems. More than four billion people are spending several hours per day with social media.

Technology—especially the smartphone—allows us to produce and share a narrative of our lives, to choose what to remember and what to contribute to our own mythos, seeking rewards from ‘friends’ through ‘likes’.

Mounting evidence supports the suspicion that Social Media can be addictive and impact personality development with long-term consequences not yet understood.

We lack the scientific and regulatory framework that technology companies and their regulators need to avoid a potentially destructive outcome.

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Abraham Maslow’s theory of human motivation, now over 80 years old, continues to have a strong influence on business and economic issues. Although the paper was written for psychologists, it has created a significant impact on management theory.

In contrast to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs towards self-actualization, one can apply an intelligence-focused view, where wisdom represents the highest level of human fulfilment

The mindset of Maslow’s hierarchy remains valid, provided the basic-level needs are expanded with internet connectivity. The challenge we face is to explore the ‘mystery’ of wisdom with psychological, philosophical and scientific expertise, including AI.

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Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind as well, is a rather new concept in cognitive science.

Research shows that embodiment and learning correlate in achieving cognitive intelligence. Going one step further, DeepMind, Alphabets’ AI research unit has set forth the hypothesis that the promise of awards will enhance this learning process with AI based reinforcement learning.

However, there are other intelligences which are beyond cognition, supporting the fact that across the entire spectrum of human’s intellectual capacity, humans cannot be replaced by intelligent machines.

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