Have you ever wondered this universe wherein it is vast? There is an almost unlimited number of planets out there. So, where are the other intelligent forms? The theory is that many have existed throughout time, but each past civilization has become so technologically advanced.
These technological existence and innovations have ended up causing their own destruction. We have split this into five sections; everything about this technological crisis that could possibly kill us, humans.
#01 Tech Explosion
You don’t need to say that technology is evolving fast. In the last 50 years alone, computers have become a trillion times more powerful. To visualize this scale, imagine a $1 note. It’s about one millimeter thick, absolutely tiny.
Still, if we had a trillion of those notes and stacked them, it would be enough to go from Earth all the way to the international space station orbiting the planet and back again. A hundred and twenty-five times.
#02 The Human Problem
Whilst technology is skyrocketing, and humans are relatively fixed. In the whole of the last 50,000 years, our intelligence, speed, strength have barely budged. Humanity has built some incredible things collectively as a race. We’ve learned to generate electricity, build space rockets, and so on.
But from 50,000 years ago, if we pulled a single human baby and raised it today, the distinction would be pretty mediocre. You might not even notice. As technology improves, humans will start to become less intelligent. We’re seeing this happening already.
Our reliance on Google Maps, online translation, scrabble word finder, calculators in our pockets have already led us to actually possessing worse raw skills if you took those things away. Are there times that you left home without your smartphone and literally did not know what to do with yourself.
Because we’re increasingly outsourcing our thinking to technology over time, we start using fewer brains. And this is a problem you see the way genetics works is whenever a trait or a characteristic becomes less critical to a species, it generally gets evolved out of the system.
A future where humans become less exciting and less useful compared to technology. A modern smartphone, with its ability to fly between powerful applications, can keep the user entertained far more consistently than even most people can.
#03 The Convergence
Humans could very well become a sidepiece to technology unless we merge with it. At this point, human-robot cyborgs part man part machine-like you see in the movies are fake. But the core idea behind them is authentic and is already here.
You could look at economic growth, human lifespans, the levels of disease around the planet. But for almost all of these, it’s not humans themselves that are improving; it is the technology. And we are just tied to it.
#04 Is this How It Ends?
Will AI bring unlimited joy to people, or will it lead them to their grisly end? Well, it isn’t a doomsday scenario, but we have to be really careful. Some people say that the machine can never be more capable than a person that invented it.
Some say one day machines will come entirely outpower humans, but no matter how many times more powerful machines get, it will always only be able to do what it was programmed to do.
But for starters, no one person invented the computer. The computer is a culmination of the efforts of humanity. Each innovation, from fire-finding to light bulb making, has led to the creation of computers.
It is the combined work of the brightest minds of all generations before us. And so even if it was accurate that AI is limited by its creator’s intellect, we would still have an incredibly powerful AI on our side.
#05 Why?
If this technological crisis is so potentially dangerous, why do we go straight into that crisis? The answer is we’re just being human. Humans and our intelligent minds are never satisfied.
We always have the need to push forward, and this has cost us many times in the past. Our rush towards industry caused massive damage to the planet and our climate. The rush to use nuclear technology has led to threats of nuclear war that could wipe out our entire countries in one go. And this AI revolution seems to be like another one of these cases.
Takeaway
Humans should be worried. We talked a lot about the environmental crisis and other threats to humankind, but we might well be walking into something even more precarious, a technological crisis.
