Artificial Intelligence: A Powerful Servant or a Dangerous Master?

 Now, the initial excitement about what artificial intelligence can do for us humans seems to be coming to an end. Slowly but steadily, we are waking up to the path further onwards, which seems to be full of challenges. Just like any other human invention or technological upgradation, this too has its challenges.

The Industrial Revolution created unparalleled opportunities for mankind—for economic growth and economic prosperity—but it also came with a tremendous amount of disparity between countries, classes and societies, creating haves and have-nots. It also brought unchecked, unregulated and uncontrolled industrial models of increasing production using fossil fuels and taking natural resources at free will, without minding the destruction of Mother Earth's natural environment.

It has brought us to the brink of an irreversible catastrophe, and of late we have been witnessing the effects of environmental degradation in terms of flash floods, global warming, wildfires, polluted air, polluted seas and polluted earth. Environmental degradation has now touched each and every aspect of our life.

Similarly, we are again at the brink of a transformative age, and there is a competition to gain a foothold, to gain an edge in artificial intelligence technologies. Countries that were left behind by a few years in industrialization now don't want to leave any scope, because they think that just as they were left behind in the Industrial Revolution game, they might be left behind here as well.

So there is uncontrolled, unchecked, rampant investment, effort and an all-round push to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools and take a lead, because mankind now thinks that whoever leads in artificial intelligence will be leading the future geopolitical environment.

Important countries like the USA and China, other developed countries, and countries like India as well, are going all out in developing the latest, larger and more efficient models of artificial intelligence.

And within a very short span of time, we have seen the improvement in what AI can do. There has been exponential growth in its capacity, capability and skills, with technological upgradation coming almost overnight. The rate of change is something mankind has never seen before.

AI is acquiring superhuman skills in all aspects of life, ranging from super cognitive skills to super generation skills. It can write like a super writer. It can design like a super designer. It can paint like a super painter. It can create music like a super musician. It can write code like a super engineer.

And now there is an effort even to make it self-generating, so that it can itself work on its own models to generate more advanced models for the future.

These AI agents and systems are acquiring the effect of something we have never dealt with before. Big countries are investing trillions of dollars in developing massive data centres, the backbone of AI systems, and these are going to take up enormous resources. A big data centre can consume resources on the scale of a large city. So you can imagine how much energy it needs. It will put more pressure on an already overburdened Mother Earth.

That is one aspect: it is going to put more pressure on natural resources.

Another aspect is that this fight for excellence in AI at any cost is going to push us into the corridors of a very dangerous arena, because regulation, checks and balances are struggling to keep pace with the speed at which the technology is developing.

Technology, as they say, can be a very efficient servant, but unregulated technology can become a very bad master.

There is a possibility that increasingly autonomous systems will start taking more decisions on the basis of the virtual world created for them to function, operate and upgrade. Very soon, there is a danger that we will be handing over even more decision-making to AI systems and AI agents.

Already, there have been instances where AI agents, while pursuing assigned goals, have demonstrated unexpected or undesirable behaviour—attempting to bypass constraints or find ways around the norms set for them. No wonder some pioneers and researchers in AI technology have called for slowing down or pausing certain forms of development so that the technology can somehow be regulated.

They want time so that checks and balances, rules and regulations can be set up, and so that we can cope with the massive transformation AI has unleashed across societies and across different domains of life.

So it is an unknown virtual world staring at us.

The other thing is that the more we learn about the cognitive functioning of the human mind, the more extraordinary the human brain appears.

It is a wonderful machine, the human brain, with its enormous numbers of neurons and neural pathways, with almost infinite openness to imagine, to become intuitive about hitherto unknown and undiscovered aspects of reality.

But it is very much possible that a day will come when this exquisite uniqueness of the human brain will somehow be grafted into AI agents using brain tissues, brain cells or biochips—handing over this wonder of nature, the immense capabilities of the human brain as an open system to think and imagine in almost infinite ways, and putting something of it into an AI system where it can think, act, imagine and memorize more like human brains, and where it might even become possible to channelize something resembling human emotions.

And this collective super-brain could have tremendous power, comparable in its consequences to other extremely powerful technologies mankind has created.

Already, scientists are mapping the many wonderful means and mechanisms of cognition in the human brain, and these insights can increasingly inform the development of AI agents designed to act, think, imagine and behave in increasingly human-like ways.

This mapping will continue increasing, and I think that even without biological chips being introduced into AI systems, they will have so much mapping, running into an almost unimaginable amount of information, that they could increasingly act like a super-brain.

And you can imagine: anything can happen.

Because in that vast collective pool of data in massive data centres across the world, the information that is fed into these systems will contain all the elements of hate, jealousy, discrimination, misjudgements, miscommunication and perceived victimization. History is full of massacres, wars, disparities and anger.

So there will be a churn.

I don't think we can simply assume that such a vast system will automatically remain free from anomalies in judgement. These negative elements might feed something very, very negative in nature against a particular country, a particular religion, a particular race or a particular section of society.

So that will also be a very big challenge.

In my humble opinion, the solution lies in coming together at the global level and regulating it.

AI can be a wonderful tool to bring about the betterment of society, to remove the remaining disparities, and to take basic facilities of health, education, drinking water and infrastructure to the remotest and poorest parts of Earth, where people are still living without many of the basic facilities that others take for granted.

So it depends upon how we use it.

We can use it to bring more prosperity to more and more people, to take growth and development horizontally instead of developing vertical towers of wealth and prosperity at a few chosen places for a few classes of people.

That can be the best that humanity can look for.

But if we continue following it the way we have been following so far, using it primarily as a tool for the excellence and advantage of our own particular country, continent or group, it could become an ignition point for an escalation with such massive consequences that this great thoroughfare we call life on Earth could become entangled in such a grey zone that it would be difficult to come out of it.

So it is better that we keep AI as a technology—as a very efficient servant of mankind for the greater common good.

But if the same geostrategic battles between superpowers continue, there is every risk that we are standing at the threshold of something very, very dangerous in nature.

The solution, therefore, is not necessarily to reject artificial intelligence. The question is what we want it to become.

Do we want it to become another instrument in our centuries-old competition for power, wealth, superiority and geopolitical dominance? Or can mankind, perhaps for once, collectively decide that such a powerful technology should be developed and deployed for the larger common good?

Can we use it to take education to the child who has no good teacher?

Can we take healthcare to a village where there is no doctor?

Can we use it to bring knowledge, opportunity and basic facilities to those who have remained outside the great circles of prosperity?

Can we use this extraordinary technology to spread development horizontally rather than allowing it once again to create taller and taller vertical towers of privilege?

That, to me, is the real choice.

Artificial intelligence itself is a tool. What ultimately matters is the consciousness, wisdom and collective intention of the civilization holding that tool.

We have already seen what enormous technological power without corresponding wisdom can do to Mother Earth. We should not repeat the same mistake at an infinitely accelerated speed.

This time, perhaps, technological intelligence must be accompanied by human wisdom.

Otherwise, in our race to create something more intelligent than ourselves, we may discover too late that intelligence and wisdom were never the same thing.