Artificial Intelligence Threat Theory: What Are We Really Afraid of?

The man-machine Go battle finally came to an end today, with AlphaGo defeating South Korean star Lee Sedol 4:1 and winning fourth place in the world Go rankings.

This is definitely a game that will go down in the history of human civilization, and people have already realized this before the game started. Although the result of the game is not enough to bring a final conclusion to this question, the curiosity of human beings about this question is enough to make this game more popular than any previous world-class Go competition.

On the afternoon of March 9, AlphaGo won its first game, sparking discussions about artificial intelligence surpassing humans; it then won two games in a row, becoming the first to secure victory, and professional terms in the field of artificial intelligence, such as machine learning and deep learning, have received unprecedented attention; in the fourth game, AlphaGo made a mistake, and humans finally won a game, but some netizens speculated, "Did AlphaGo do it on purpose?" Until this afternoon, AlphaGo won again, securing its place in the top four of the global Go rankings, and the theory of the threat of artificial intelligence has once again been put on the "agenda."

What is the first thing that comes to our mind?

People from all walks of life began to join the discussion about artificial intelligence, so the style of this topic on a well-known domestic community became like this:

It is not difficult to find that, like the proposals of the NPC deputies, the questions of the participants are all about their own business. The basic sentence structure can be summarized as "Will artificial intelligence defeat humans in XXX field?", where XXX is mostly the industry the questioner is engaged in. When another form of labor emerges that can match or even surpass human labor in terms of capabilities, it is natural that the most direct concern of humans is focused on the question of "Will they be replaced?"

This is indeed happening in many industries. On the day when Lee Sedol won, foreign media reported that the editorial department of South Korea's Financial News officially used an artificial intelligence reporter, who can complete a news report on stock market conditions in 0.3 seconds. This is another "robot" joining the ranks of reporters after the New York Times, Xinhua News Agency, and Tencent. In the service industry, robot front desks have also begun to appear in department stores, banks and other places.

Kai-Fu Lee said that the emergence of artificial intelligence will lead to the threat of unemployment for many non-expert workers. In the next ten years, most of today's human jobs can be replaced by machines, such as nurses, journalists, accountants, teachers, stock and financial planners, and any position with the words "assistant", "agent" or "agent". It can be seen that people's concerns are not unfounded. Artificial intelligence is replacing "people" in more and more positions.

Is there anything more terrifying?

If artificial intelligence is just a machine that can replace human work, its emergence is not enough to make people afraid. When machines help us create most of the world's wealth, what bothers humans at best is a wealth distribution problem that has never been solved, which is not enough to bring about a devastating disaster. In other words, artificial intelligence poses a deeper threat than replacing human work.

When AlphaGo won the first game, there was a view circulating online: It is not scary for Google's Go program to win against humans, but it is scary to pretend to lose to humans, which reveals the ultimate fear of human beings towards artificial intelligence:

This is the scene described in the movie "The Matrix". At this stage, artificial intelligence has achieved good results in "intelligence". In the future, is it possible for artificial intelligence to surpass humans in "strategy"? By then, the plot of humans enslaving machines will be reversed, and in the future, humans will be the "enslaved" species!

Artificial Intelligence Threat Theory: We are on the brink of change

Regarding this almost crazy speculation, many experts in the field of artificial intelligence said that artificial intelligence still has a long way to go before it can learn autonomously, and the scenes in science fiction novels will not appear in real life in the short term. However, when IBM's "Deep Blue" defeated the chess king Kasparov, didn't some people say that Go is an impenetrable fortress for computers? Now, it is less than 10 years away from this prediction.

On this issue, Bill Gates, Musk, Hawking and other technology giants have publicly spoken out, warning people to be wary of artificial intelligence technology. Musk and Hawking have also won the "Innovation Obstacles" Award from the IT and Innovation Foundation. Judging from the performance of AlphaGo, the concerns of the bigwigs are not just groundless.

Hawking may have summarized the threat of artificial intelligence in The Independent: "Although the short-term impact of artificial intelligence depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all." Professor Kai-Fu Lee's warning is more inspiring: the real crisis of artificial intelligence is that in the future machines will feed idle people. In fact, what is more terrifying than this is that people did not begin to realize the seriousness of the problem until this conjecture became a reality.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.