With the advent of ChatGPT, the world turned its attention to artificial intelligence (AI).

On March 17, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI – the company that created ChatGPT – said “we’re a little scared”. Warning on the need to protect against the negative consequences of artificial intelligence. A month earlier Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla mentioned: “One of the biggest risks to the future of civilization is AI.” In this same line of thinking, Steve Wosniak, co-founder of Apple, pointed out about artificial intelligence: “The problem is that it does good things for us, but it can make terrible mistakes without knowing what humanity is.”

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However, on the other side of the road, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gate posted on his blog on March 21 this year: “The era of AI has begun. AI is as revolutionary as mobile phones and the internet.”

Given all these visions, is artificial intelligence a real threat to humanity? From the beginning of the Stone Age approximately 2.5 million years ago, humans were introduced to technology by developing the first stone tools made of wood and bone such as arrowheads, hammers, axes and knives.

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Considering that the Stone Age represents 99% of all prehistory and human history, and that only 263 years have passed since the beginning of the industrial revolution until today, then if we divide those 263 years by the 2.5 million years that our species has been on the face of the Earth it tells us that the time elapsed since the beginning of the industrial revolution until now represents only 0.01% of our entire existence.

The interesting thing about this little analysis is that 99.99% of all technological power created by humans was developed in that 0.01%. In other words, our species has entered an exponential era in its relationship with technology.

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These days, technological advances in artificial intelligence led by ChatGPT seem to be going “too fast” with all the dangers that entails.

For the first time in all of human history, technological development is advancing at such a speed that human jobs as we know them do not have enough time to adapt to the very disruptive and rapid changes that come with artificial intelligence.

So are we close to a technological singularity?

If we go back to the year 1957, when John von Neumann noted: “The ever-accelerating advance of technology…gives the impression of approaching an essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human things as we know them could not proceed.”

There doesn’t seem to be enough time like there was in 99.99% of our entire history to simultaneously adapt to such rapid and disruptive technological changes.

As pointed out at BBC In 2014, prominent scientist Stephen Hawking, “efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence (…) The development of full artificial intelligence could mean the end of the human race.”

Much more than before, the world must realize that the development of technology must always be in the service of humanity, not in opposition to it. Well-managed artificial intelligence will make this planet a better place to live, but if it falls into the wrong hands, it could be the beginning of the end. (OR)