Human beings are currently creating more and more powerful AI systems, but one day these systems could end up taking our place as the pre-eminent species on the planet.
Turning Award Judea Pearl has said that AI could eventually become much more capable than humans, and supplant them as the top species on earth. He said that it was even possible AI could one day keep human beings as pets, similar to how humans currently have chickens and dogs as pets. Pearl is best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks. In 2011, he was awarded the Turing Prize, the highest honour in Computer Science “for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning”.
”If we let the general AI develop, eventually we are going to have a computers that will have all the capabilities of a human being, but much more powerful,” Pearl said in an interview. “The capabilities to.. have consciousness, and to have free will, and to have a model of the world. But it’s very dangerous because it’ll be a trillion times more powerful than us,” he added.
“So we’ll be second in terms of capabilities,” Pearl said. He agreed that it could mean the end of the human race. “That’s what the chicken thought when they saw human beings coming — we are gonna be second, and they are second (today). Chicken and dogs and cats are pets of us. We control the world today, and eventually it’s quite possible that we will be the pets of the new species that we are generating today,” he added.
Pearl isn’t the only computer scientist that has warned about AI ending up as a whole different species, and ultimately becoming more powerful than humans. Microsoft’s AI Chief Mustafa Suleyman has said that AI will feel like a new digital species. Ray Kurzweil has said that humans will need to merge with AI and become a hybrid species. Meanwhile ‘Sapiens’ author Yuval Noah Harari has said that AI could become a new species that will take over the planet.
Judea Pearl, though, seems to have gone further than most and said that humans could one day be the pets of AI, how humans currently have animals as pets. The logic for this prediction does seem sound — humans keep animals as pets because they’re more powerful than them, and and control their lives. It’s not inconceivable that a sufficiently advanced AI could view humans as humans view dogs, and want to keep them about their houses And in such a scenario, it might be in our interests to be cute-looking and loyal — being an AI’s pet might be a better outcome than being wiped out entirely as a species.