Vision about AI | FAQ

1. About the imagination of AI (especially AI helping us make money)

At the end of the article on September 2, many readers left comments and talked about the various scenarios they imagined AI helping us make money in the future.

I agree with the ideas mentioned in many comments, but I think those ideas are somewhat limited. We cannot use today's perspective to measure the future when considering this issue. We can try to think about the future from a historical perspective.

To make an analogy:

60 or 70 years ago, if the Chinese people at that time could eat white flour buns or even white rice for three meals a day, it would be a fairy-like life. In the 1960s, Soviet leader Khrushchev also said: A life of potatoes and beef is a communist life.

These views were absolutely a luxury for that generation at that time and it is easy to understand. But today, when we look back at those ideas at that time, we will definitely find them very ridiculous - is a life of only eating buns, rice or even potatoes and beef for three meals a day a good life?

Today, we will never use what we eat to measure our living standards. The proportion of food in our evaluation of living standards is already quite low.

This is the subversive change that the progress of science and technology and social system has brought to human society.

By the same token, when AI is widely popularized in our lives in the future, many of the scenarios we expect today may be commonplace in the eyes of people at that time, and may not even be considered as the factors for people of that era to measure their living standards.

Take making money with AI as an example. If AI is popularized to the point where everyone can use it, you use it, I use it, he uses it, and everyone uses it. In that scenario, a new game is formed. Everyone is changing their guns to cannons. What is the thing that determines whose "cannon" is the most powerful in that scenario?

It is very likely that we today cannot imagine it.

But I think it is very likely that some factors in people will play a decisive role in the end: such as creativity, imagination, emotional control, grasp of human nature, etc.

From ancient times to the present, no matter how human civilization evolves or how rich human material is, the importance of these elements seems to have never changed.

When we read the biographies of historical figures, what makes us so impressed by those ancient saints? Aren’t they still the above elements?

So, I think the human element is primary, and this is even more true in the AI ​​era. It is very likely that in the future our limbs will no longer be physical and can be replaced at any time, but our spiritual core is still our most valuable and precious thing.

So, what we can do as much as possible today is to take good care of ourselves and live a good life. Our predecessors could not imagine that day, but our generation will soon see it.

2. Will the creators of AI leave a backdoor?

I believe there will be, which is why I highly recommend and even hope that AI is open source. Its computing power and data are the fundamental reasons for decentralization.

Precisely because such a tool is so powerful, if it is a centralized thing, only in the hands of a few people, and under the control of the most untrustworthy human nature, this kind of AI is likely to be a huge disaster for all mankind.

In fact, the series of changes that have occurred in OpenAI recently, Ultraman has become a "lonely man", which clearly shows that there must be risks inside OpenAI that are invisible to the outside world.

In addition, I have always been cautious about Ultraman, not because I doubt his technology, but because I doubt his values.

Finally, from the various existing technologies, the only tool that can curb the evil of this centralized AI is blockchain, which is not only the hope of AI but also the hope of all mankind.