Is Artificial Intelligent/ Machine learning an existential risk for human civilization

For now, I would say I strongly agree with this statement. Why? It is clearly because, AI is better than human intelligence in a lot of aspects.

Why AI is better than human intelligence?

• Human intelligence cannot handle huge number of information, evidences, possibilities while it is an easy task for machine.
• Human intelligence keep making logic errors while it never happens on machine with intelligence.

According to Wikipedia, AI is an intelligence demonstrated by machine which mimics the cognitive functions of human such as “learning” and “problem solving”. Imagine with the superiority of machine integrated with the capability to learn and solve any kind of problem, this makes AI as frightening technology in 21^st century as machine starts to replace human in a lot of fields.

Moreover, AI is programmed to something beneficial, however, it develops a destructive method for achieving the goal. One of the example of this is when you ask a smart self-driving car to take you to the airport as fast as possible, it might get you chased by police for doing not what you wanted but literally what you asked for.

Ladies and gentlemen, nowadays a lot of tasks used to work by human now replaced by machine. The example of AI implementation as follows:

Personal assistant (Siri, Alexa)
Siri and Alexa use machine learning to get smarter and better to predict and understand our natural-language questions and request. It already replaces the office secretary and home assistant tasks.

Self-driving car (Tesla, Uber) 
Self-driving technology in Tesla already replace the human car’s driver. The biggest online taxi company Uber, now also in the middle of developing the self-driving technology into their product and predicted will replace a lot of conventional taxi company.

Customer support (Cogito) 
Cogito is a company which implement emotional intelligence of customer support representative based on the capability of their system to adapt customer behaviour. It uses machine learning and behavioural science to improve customer interaction. It already replaces human customer support.

Media (Netflix, Pandora) 
Netflix and Pandora use predictive technology based on customer reaction and choices of movies. Then, analyses billion of records and starts to suggest suitable movies to the customer. It already replaces conventional media company.

Online E-commerce (Amazon) 
Amazon uses machine learning to predict what we’re interested based on customer online behaviour. They also use machine learning to develop personal shopping assistant to help the customer answering their questions. It already replaces conventional retail company

In regards of AI destructive method, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and space X, a company which has exposure to the most cutting-edge AI, was speaking on-stage at the National Governor Association. He was telling about the fact that machines with AI can do anything better than human. He also concerns about AI that we need to pro-actively create some regulation on AI instead of reactive. Because by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’s already too late.

Nick Bostrom, Oxford University philosopher who has built his reputation on the study of “existential risk” said that AI might be the most apocalyptic technology of all. With all intellectual capabilities beyond human comprehension, self-improving mechanism, could effortlessly enslave or even destroy homo sapiens.

Imagine if AI getting smarter which is now starting to replace human, combine with AI destructive method, this is clearly a potential object which causing real apocalypse and human extinction.

As conclusion, based on my argument I have proven 2 points.

First, AI starts to replace human in all aspect of life due the fact they are better than human.

Second, AI develops destructive method to achieve goals as it is hard to align human and AI’s goals.

So those two analysis prove the reason why Artificial Intelligent/ Machine learning is an existential risk for human civilization.