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Human beings, like this forgotten tennis ball
CC Jean Stimmell:11/28/14in a tree along the Merrimack, must find their place in the natural world |
Artificial intelligence describes computer systems that
perform tasks that used to require human intelligence and perception but are
now accomplished by software and robots. This has lead to more unemployed
Americans and significantly slowed our recovery from the Great Recession.
Alarmingly, experts predict that this trend will not
only escalate but become deeply disturbing in other ways: “in the wake of recent technological advances in computer vision,
speech recognition and robotics, scientists say they are increasingly concerned
that artificial intelligence technologies may permanently displace human
workers, roboticize warfare and
make of Orwellian surveillance techniques easier to develop, among other
disastrous effects.[i]
Even in today’s world, we find ourselves unable to
protect our fellow workers because of political gridlock, which appears
seamlessly related to the unprecedented power multinational corporations hold
over not only our government but governments around the world.
As if that is not bad enough, a more terrifying scenario
may soon await us: the prospect that this accelerating progress in technologies
will cause a runaway effect wherein artificial intelligence will exceed human
intellectual capacity and control.
This is called the technological singularity hypothesis
or what I would call the ultimate nightmare: “Because the capabilities of such an intelligence may be
impossible to comprehend, the technological singularity is an occurrence beyond
which events are unpredictable or even unfathomable.”[ii]
To me, the choice seems obvious: either we return to
our biological and spiritual home – reconnecting to our bodies, our communities,
our sense of place, and Mother Earth – or become soulless slaves to the
machine.
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