THE PERSON RUNNING YOUR LIFE.
”I do not understand what I do, For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.” – Apostle Paul
I want to introduce you to the person responsible for much of the decisions that you make, why you chose the wife or husband that you currently have, the job that you do, the friends that you have, the colours in your house, the car make that you prefer and so on.
My reason for exploring this person in detail is that a person this powerful should be known, considering how much influence he wields on us.
I know many of the decisions he is making are good for me, but there are some that he makes that I would want to influence.
I do not like for example letting him tell me when to eat or how far I can go in life.
Here I am in my conscious mind, I want to lose weight, make more money, travel round the world; but after I decide that I will only eat so and so meal this person tells me that I should forget that plan.
I set goals to build a great company and he tells me those kinds of plans are not for people like me.
For much of the writings in this article I have referred to a mental program called artificial intelligence AI, that is working in the background and influencing our lives. This AI is very powerful and makes a lot of decisions for us that we are not even aware of.
Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, writing for the US News and World Report has this to say,
“According to cognitive neuroscientists, we are conscious of only about 5 percent of our cognitive activity, so most of our decisions, actions, emotions, and behaviour depends on the 95 percent of brain activity that goes beyond our conscious awareness”.
If you drive regularly, I am sure that you have had the experience of driving a few kilometres and unaware of when and how you did it.
What was happening was that your AI just took control and gave the instructions on the lane to take, the speed to go at and what else you needed to do.
How is the AI able to do this? When you were learning to drive, you wrote mental programs of why you drove the way you did, why you went at that speed and how you might react if you met something strange.
Once your AI got the code, he didn’t really need you again.
Growing up you were living in a slum housing environment. Every time you wanted a good toy, your father told you those beautiful toys are not for you; at first you resisted it, but after a while you accepted it and told your AI to make sure you never went near those fine toys again. Now your AI works round the clock to protect you from good toys.
There has been fears recently on the growth of artificial intelligence in the computer world. One of such persons who is afraid of the spread of AI is Elon Musk.
Why is there fear and a call for legislation on the spread of AIs? AIs are not Robots. They are developed to think.
A robot is programmed with a set of reactive instructions such as “if you hear this sound then do this…”, if you come across an obstacle then do this and that. That makes robots dumb servants. This is not the case with AI.
AIs are developed to think, to observe and come up with their solutions. In 2017, when Google’s “DEEP MIND”, an AI developed by Google beat the world Chess champion, people started expressing worries on the future of AI. The amazing thing about DEEP MIND was that it learnt to play Chess just a few hours before playing with the world chess champion.
An AI is loaded with a set of codes on how decisions are made, and it is then programmed to come up with its own decisions when faced with any challenge.
When you say someone has 20 years’ experience in playing Chess, an AI can play Chess repeatedly overnight and get a hundred years’ experience in just 24 hours.
The fear is that will the computer industry preload for example an intelligence to kill an enemy on an object and the object preloaded with AI becomes so experienced and go after humans?
To be continued!
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“How We Experience Life” is a series written by Engr Tunde Ekpekurede.