Artificial Intelligent is endangering Human Civilization. Part 3

Use of AI in relation to Ethics and Morality. Where do we draw the Line?

Continue from what I have wrote before, I think the best approach to this dialogue is to ask a simple question - "What is a Civilization?" What constitutes a society to become a civilization? What are the criteria? What are the necessary development which a society have to make in order for it to be considered as a civilization? 

While that question could be something redundant to be asked, the truth is, not many could agree with the definition of a Civilization. Just open a Google search engine and type in "Define Civilization" and you can come out with various definition of what a civilization is.

Examples :

A civilization (or civilisation) is any complex society characterized by the development of the state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language (namely, a writing system).[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]

source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization

human society with its well developed social organizations, or the culture and way of life of a society or country at a particular period in time

source : https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/civilization

A civilization is a complex human society that may have certain characteristics of cultural and technological development.

Source : https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/civilizations/

Synonyms of civilization

1a : a relatively high level of cultural and technological developmentspecifically : the stage of cultural development at which writing and the keeping of written records is attained

b: the culture characteristic of a particular time or place the impact of European civilization on the lands they colonized

2: the process of becoming civilized civilization is a slow process with many failures and setbacks

3a: refinement of thought, manners, or taste exhibiting a high level of civilization

b: a situation of urban comfort Our African safari was quite interesting, but it was great to get back to civilization.

source : https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/civilization

From all these definitions, what we can take away from them are that they all agree that Civilization means development, developed society, creation of a complex society, a social structure, developed culture (or cultures as the World is a very diverse place), technological development and refinement in thoughts and mannerism befitting an advance society.

So frankly speaking, do we fit in these categories as an advance civilizations? Except for our technological development which I could not deny, what other criteria had been fulfilled to be called a civilized society? Of course personally, I could say that we do have a good level of cultural development in form of music, arts, literature and movies (all which seems to be in decline for the past twenty years though). 

Some of you could have already guess which direction (or perspective) I'm coming from here when comes to the issue of using Artificial Intelligent. I believe that the use of AI in above mentioned fields are diminishing the ability of humans to progress forward in fields of culture, creative thoughts and ideas, communication between individuals and develop of mannerism which are required for advancement of humans as species and as a civilization. If we were to keep "automating" all these necessary functions to an AI, humans going to become a deaf, mute and dumb animals, depending solely on soul-less and life-less machines to make decisions for us. 

Yes, some could argue that AI is required here because they do not make mistake OR at least they will diminish the possibility of human error. Then how are we as a species going to learn? If humans are too afraid to make mistakes, they will not attempt new things. We will become like a child who is too scared to make mistake because they could be ridicules, laughed at or mocked. Coming from a background where I was in such position growing up (being ridiculed, mocked and laughed at all the way until I had reach teenage years), I can understand why some could rely on AI and machines to make decisions for them. 

However, personally I think the long term effect on relying on AI to create contents for us will be a very bad decision as a species. Our future generation will grow dependent on machines to do thinking for us and as you already seen the effect of using smartphones (which reduced the attention span from 12 to 8 seconds as mentioned earlier), the possibility of relying too much on technology, machine and AI to do thinking for us could likely dull our own intellectual capability to create, analyse, compare and even debate among ourselves. 

We will likely to become creatures of passion and emotions, killing our own intellectual capability in the long run which could lead to passionate and emotional based decisions which ultimately lead to our own destruction. Intellectual facilities needed to balance out our emotional facilities. That is why Nature gave us three-part brains (left, right and middle) which constitutes for emotional, intellectual and animalistic qualities in all humans.

So the question could rise - Am I against the use of Artificial Intelligence? Am I against AI? The answer is No, however I could consider AI as a tool to be used by humans and not something to be used to hide behind or something which we should use for short-term profit at the expense of long-term human development, like what we are seeing in various industries as already mentioned on the very beginning of my 1st post.

I do believe that we could need the use of robotics and AI for various fields such as deep sea exploration, mining, wild-life monitoring, coastal monitoring, defense, resource management, farming and plantations and other such works which requires additional information for better management and because these industries does not attract young people who thinks they are not glamorous jobs. These could change, if the governments could increase salary scope and benefits associated with such job specks to attract young people. But many consider such move as non-profitable moves. 

Take Japan for example. Calls to improve their anime/manga industries had been heard since 1980s but there had not been much done in that field (to improve the manga and anime industry). However, as more and more Animes and Mangas (like Bleach!, Naruto and latest one, Demon Slayer which had outsold American comics in 2020) doing well overseas, the move was made to "automatize" Japanese Anime and Manga instead of improving the industry to creating better environment and workplace for its artists. How is this in any shape and form improve productivity? All they going to do is create Frankenstein products.

And now, we also have two more fields where AI are being used more toward as tools to reduce expenditure and increase profit. Video game industry had always been a profitable industry since 1990s and its profits only increased with the advent of networked gaming platform. Online games are quickly took over where the single-player games were before as online games are more profitable and now, it seems that some people had found out that creating games using factory settings (Frankenstein products as I called it previously) were more profitable. It had been so bad lately and if you were anything like myself, you could notice that more and more gamers had turn to "reviewing" games made some twenty years back instead of insulting themselves by playing the newer monstrosities like Forspoken. 

Even games which had been made well before (like the original Horizon Zero Dawn in 2013) had been butchered to the point that a lot of people have complains about it recently with the new sequel. And games like Elden Ring which refused to use these so-called "established patterns" by big game developers are being called out, ridiculed and bashed online just so other developing game companies could not use their ideas, approaches and game-play as example on how to make games. Do you see the pattern here? Those who are not following the established patterns are ridiculed, mocked and laughed at for taking newer or different approaches to doing things.

And lastly pornography. Question - WHERE do we draw the line on morality and ethics?

That is the question I could like to ask with the development of AI by certain shady groups who wants to use AI for things like Deepfakes (which can be used to paste faces of regular people onto porn-stars and produce newer pornography contents) - again another Frankenstein product which we could possibly see coming out in couple of years. 

Also, the use of AI for sex chatbox. We already have things like phone sexchat and OnlyFan accounts so it is not too far-fetched to combine these with AI and create a content which some groups could benefit from. And lastly, robotic sex slaves. That may not appear for at least another 50 years but we have already seen machines that mimics humans, even looking like humans (refer to the source below). Most of these comes from South Korea, China and Japan. So the question here is - how far before we see sex robots making debut into the sex industry? 

So far, I do not see anyone drawing a line in term of morality and ethics. There are no talks about whether humans should create laws to stop such manipulation of robots and AI at expense of humanity in the long run. Most talks I had listened to often emphasis on the positive values of robots and AI (which I do agree to exist) but felt deaf and mute when need for any form of limitation, rules and regulation is put on the table. 

So I like to end it here with the hope that I had covered why I believe the use of AI is endangering the human civilization. Why I do not think that there will be a rise of machines like Skynet in the future (at least not for another 100 years, I hope), there are plenty of ways where overuse, improper use and unsupervised use of robotics and Artificial Intelligence will endanger the human civilization nevertheless. Unless someone could bring forth Laws like what they created for Nuclear Weapons and Development in 1950s and for Prohibition of Biological Weapons in 1972. 

Source : https://builtin.com/robotics/humanoid-robots