Essay

According to the WHO about 8.5% of the world’s population are currently infected or have died because of Covid-19, compared to 30% who were infected or died due to the Spanish Flu. The application of AI such as the rapid development of new vaccines have so far played a major role in preventing a global disaster.

Yet the Covid-19 pandemic has left serious scars both individually as well as economically. The massive rise of unemployment due to corporate closings severely threatens the foundation of our socioeconomic balance.

To heal the scars and to restore trust in our democratic culture we need a creative mindset of solving problems by fostering the cooperation between humans and intelligent machines.

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Manipulative messaging at an emotional level is Donald Trump’s approach to gain public support. The ‘Terror Management Theory’ assumes that existential terror and anxiety is always residing below the surface of one’s awareness. To manage this terror, humans adopt views, like religions, political ideologies, and national identities,  far from any rational arguments.

Moreover, studies conducted by the Pew Research Center in October 2020 show that Democrats and Republicans largely disagree on key values.

Hopefully, the upcoming US administration will be successful in reducing frustration and hate under the slogan of ‘Making Democracy Great Again’.

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Our minds have evolved to think so that we can better adapt to our environment and make smarter decisions on how to survive. At a biological level, our thoughts are millions of neurons firing off in our brains. These brain cells working together create concepts  and knowledge that arises in our consciousness.

In 1985, AI-Pioneer Marvin Minsky pointed out that the question is not whether intelligent machines can have any emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent without emotions.

As neuroscience and related behavioural analysis are accelerating intelligence research, the functionality of the human brain is seen as guide in advancing AI towards human-like intelligence. Along this process the human capacity to think and to rethink has become an important design factor in AI development.

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The major challenge for building collective intelligence is to combine knowledge from different sources and to customize this information for the specific needs of individual users and local organisations.

Two types of assets are of increasing importance: data and people. Adding AI to the equation sets the stage for merging human and machine intelligence, taking advantage of the assets that both bring to the table.

A principal feature of innovative regions is their capacity to create environments favourable to turning knowledge into new products and services

An AI-Collaboration Platform is the prerequisite for forming and supporting regional intelligence with modules covering the entire innovation process.

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Anxiety is the reaction to stressful, dangerous, or unfamiliar situations. It is the sense of uneasiness, distress, or dread you feel before a significant event.
The risk of anxiety causing depression can, in the worst case, lead to self-destructive actions. Existential concerns are one the most mentioned reasons for anxiety as the potential loss of jobs due to digital transformation and automation has become a highly publicized issue.

Creativity is expected to become more valuable than technical skills as artificial intelligence outpaces human cognition. Fostering creative thinkers must become a primary focus of educators. Expanding the horizon of individual’s awareness, the study of humanities must resurge as cognitive skills to solve technical problems will gradually be automated.

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While the mutual relevance of humanities, social sciences and neuroscience has increased significantly, the complexity to analyse brain functionality with current AI technology has reached limits. Expanding AI with new insights from neuroscience is required to overcome these barriers.

Abstract concepts like creativity, human desires, social cognition, meaning and free will are necessary components of any conscious being but have proven to be extremely difficult to formalize mathematically.

Keeping human thought and its relationship to individual non-computational experiences alive, human-level AI will remain and support us as a building block for the exploration of new frontiers. Hence a third AI-winter is highly unlikely to occur.

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Artificial brains are man-made machines that are just as intelligent, creative and self-aware as biological brains. No such machine has yet been built and to some scientist’s view, artificial brains will never reach the functionality level of biological human brains.

Based on the exponential growth of scientific knowledge, however, this could happen sometimes within this century, raising the question how humans will adapt to this evolutionary milestone.

Our current philosophical and psychological inventory lacks the capacity to comprehend the impact of this achievement. Consequently, strong ethical guidelines of self-regulation are required. Otherwise humanity runs the risk of becoming slaves of its own creation.

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The rise of fake information and the proliferation of artificially generated narratives are challenging publishers as well as social media and e-commerce platforms.

AI provides tools to detect Deepfakes, yet there will be counterefforts to bypass this detection. In this technology-based ‘cops and robbers’ scenario, to distinguish fake from reality and the danger of being manipulated, we have to resort to consciousness and common-sense for the protection of our integrity.

Humans have become ‘sandwiched’ between fake- manipulation and trust. To get out of this position we must apply our unique capacity: think.

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Humans’ ability to collaborate for reaching otherwise inaccessible goals may be one main cause for our success as a species. Collective intelligence emerges when these contributions are combined to become more than the sum of their parts.

As the individual intellectual capacity of humans is limited vis-à-vis an accelerating increase in scientific and technological complexity, the application of collective intelligence augmented by AI, dubbed CAI, is a major driver for future value generation.

As AI is maturing and eventually turning cognitive intelligence into a commodity, integrating human assets such as curiosity, creativity and moral judgement are a must to realize the value that can be generated with CAI-platforms.

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Evolution did not reach the status of being a scientific theory until Charles Darwin published his famous book ‘On the Origin of Species’ in 1859. Only the ‘fittest’ organisms are likely to survive, passing on their traits to the next generation.

The augmentation of human intelligence with machines is impacting our societies as those ahead in developing and applying this technology are more fit for survival than those which stay behind.

The upcoming automation of AI and the availability of new brain-interface technology to augment and enhance human’s intellectual capacity stipulate that evolution is gradually shifting to a selection based on technological supremacy.

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