A lot is being made of artificial intelligence, and very little of it is actually good. While I think AI will eventually play a great role in our future and its heavy utilization by humanity is nothing short of inevitable, there are many things we need to first do as a species to prepare ourselves for its arrival.
Right now, AI can accomplish many things that don’t exactly help the human race. You’ve heard a lot about it helping students cheat on tests to the point of being able to pass law exams. It’s not at all good, but if that was the worst thing it did, then the dangers of AI would be laughable. It gets far worse. There are sites that allow you to submit pictures of people you know and the AI will re-render these photos with these people in the nude, violating people’s privacy in some of the worst ways imaginable.
It can now screen job candidates, which is terrifying when you consider how pervasive and thorough an AI can be in looking into your digital footprint, and combined with the creator’s bias, you may not find a job in your field ever again. Oh, and speaking of jobs, they might just make the middle man the employee and the AI will take your job anyway.
Then there’s the social aspect of AI. An AI is just as biased as its creator, and if the creator has given an AI the responsibility of running anything from a search algorithm to moderating a social media website, you can expect the social atmosphere to shift whichever way the programmer’s ideals dictate. News, opinions, and audio/video cuts will all lend toward a certain bias that could affect anything from peer-to-peer conversations to elections.
One of the people at the forefront of warning the world about the encroaching dangers of AI is Tesla/SpaceX CEO and Chief Twit, Elon Musk. Musk recently sat down to talk to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson where he warned about the encroaching danger of AI. He warned that it had the “potential of civilization destruction.”
He’s not wrong and for more than just the reasons I listed above.
But there’s one issue that few people are even addressing with AI that could literally destroy civilization by human elimination, and no, I don’t mean a human/robot war like The Matrix of the Terminator franchise.
I’ve spoken about this briefly in a previous article about my predictions for the future. One of them definitely involves AI that doesn’t just exist as a disembodied voice coming from a speaker on a shelf. In the future, AI will have a physical presence in the form of helpful robot servants. You’ve seen something like this in movies such as I, Robot. Humanoid automatons will roam around the house taking care of menial labor.
They will wash your dishes, vacuum your floors, repair your broken appliances, and even cook your food. Don’t think it’s too far away. It’s actually Musk himself who’s been working toward this goal with his Tesla robots. But as Musk is the man closest to bringing this to reality, Musk is also the man who sees how these bots could potentially become destructive.
He offhandedly mentioned how these AI automatons could also become sexual partners.
You might scoff at this idea, but one of the big dangers AI poses is becoming a sex partner that would give way to a massive decline in the population as birth rates would spiral downward.
Don’t scoff at this idea. There are people hard at work on making this happen already. Vice once did a report on this very issue where they saw this AI/automaton in development for themselves.
In my previous commentary, I wrote about how humanity could easily fall into this trap. The sex doll industry may combine with other, more advanced robotics companies via a buyout or merger. Combining the tech of a well-built and useful humanoid robot, an advanced AI that is subservient to humanity, and a synthetic but increasingly realistic human body will present something that distracts heavily from human-to-human relationships. Before you know it, people are having sex with machines and not each other, causing a population dive:
This might sound fun in the short term but it will be devastating in the long term. Having children will diminish in first-world countries as men and women no longer have a vested interest in one another. Sure, many women will give in to their instincts and seek a father for their child and there will be men who marry them, but you’ll likely see many of these women opt for donors as men willing to be in relationships become harder to find. Children will be raised primarily by human mothers and robot fathers that might look and sound human but do not remotely carry that same spark of masculinity or masculine drive.
AI will effectively kill us off by getting in the way of birthrates.
If you see this as implausible then I need only present you with the issue in Japan. The rise of the “Otaku,” or people who primarily live isolated lives, is a real threat to Japan’s birth rates which have declined so significantly that it’s become a very real crisis the country is having to deal with.
According to the BBC, 36 percent of Japanese males aged 16 to 19 have no interest in sex at all, which is a number that had doubled over the past two years.
That BBC article was written in 2013 and things haven’t gotten any better.
These Otaku prefer the companionship of AI, digital girlfriends to real women. While there are various reasons for this, the point is that these digital women will soon stop being digital and start being physical presences.
If it can happen there, it can happen here.
