Humans vs AI
Updated: Jan 2, 2021
Around 200.000 years ago, the first humans, Homo Sapiens, have appeared. Throughout this time, Sapiens have evolved from carving and barely being able to communicate and interact with, to being the most dominant species of the history of the 5 billion years of Earth. With many technological advancements and evolvements, humans have managed to take over the entire universe. Throughout the past period, humans have maintained their dominance and kept on changing the world that they've been living in massively. But what about the future? I have read many articles and books stating that Artificial Intelligence will be more dominant than humans themselves in the future, possibly in thirty or forty years. But will AI really take over humans, or do humans still have a chance to keep on dominating the world that they have been conquering for the last couple of centuries?
Humans being made up of a very complex system is undeniable. With its systems, organs, cells, and trillions of connections, humans are unique and complex. But one particular organ in the human body is a very special and an exceptional one: our brains. With its perceptual machinery, our brain navigates our body. With trillions of neurons and with many more connections, our minds have unique ways of thinking, imagining, and processing. And that's what makes people special. Humans can invent and bring out new things with their imaginations; they can keep on learning with their never-ending curiosity. But computers are a whole other story. After the famous Deep Blue (the IBM supercomputer) beat Garry Kasparov, arguably the best chess player of all time, everyone thought that computers could actually think, but that doesn't work like that. AI systems and machines are given some instructions, and the only thing they do is to spit them out when they are ordered to. They never question, they never ask and try to understand, they are not conscious, the only thing they do is to wait until they are instructed to do something. The reason for that is that they don't have brains and that machinery that allows them to think and imagine. That unique complex system everybody has, but no one has a full understanding of, makes us remarkable. A copy of our brain is impossible to create. That complicated system of trillions of cells that are connected to each other creates us, Sapiens, and their unique abilities and ways of thinking. Scientists have been spending years to have a full understanding of the brain, and they have been trying to copy it, but they haven't achieved their goals just yet. Our minds are special, and that's why computers will never dominate us.
In the future, AI will be all around us. It will be everywhere, from websites to our phones to billboards around the streets, but never forget, AI will never overtake the unique capabilities of us Sapiens because it can't think, imagine and create. If, we as humans, use our abilities to control AI; it can be one of the most useful weapons that we can possibly ask for.
Inspired by: The Brain by David Eagleman
Elif Eren
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