Can Artificial Intellegence Repalce Us?

 

Robots need not be very intelligent unlike our human brains. But they must be intelligent enough to follow orders instructed by us. If they can follow our orders to repeatedly do the same routine for us such as doing housework, delivering goods, or serving customers we would be content.

Designing and creating a robot to do these chores is tough enough for a human brain. We need to design a compact computer that would fit inside the skull of a robot that would be about the size of our human skull. But why would our intelligent human brain need to do that since the vacuum tubes to transistors to tiny integrated circuits down to silicon chips are getting smaller and smaller by the day. Instead of that, why not make the structure bigger and bigger, stronger and stronger with extremely powerful, yet tiny chips inside its brain.

Being intelligent ourselves we know that a brain that becomes too big and large would finally lose its efficiency because nerve impulses don’t travel quickly.

As scientists we know nerve impulses are extremely slow compared to the speed of electricity, where the electric field can propagate with a speed on the order of 50–99% of the speed of light; however, it is very fast compared to the speed of blood flow, with some myelinated neurons conducting at speeds up to 120 m/s (432 km/h or 275 mph). The fastest nerve impulse travels at 100 metres per second. Translated, this implies a nerve impulse can streak across from one end of the brain to the other in just four-hundred-fortieth of one second, but a brain, let’s say 14.6 km long (if there is one) would require 2.4 minutes to travel across. This would be too slow for our human brain to react. A brain of this size, no matter how intelligent we are would fall apart especially in an emergency simply because it took too long for information to travel and to wait before we could process them in our huge brains.

Thus, we need to use a computer to process and analyze information that uses not nerve impulses, but electrical impulses that travel near the speed of light – at 29,5046,400 meters per second or at 98 % the speed of light to be more precise. (The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 metres per second).

We can imagine using our human brains to devise a technology in which we use smaller and smaller but finer and finer, yet faster and faster components to analyse information much, much faster than our human brain could, and yet our robots can be as large and as strong as we wish. Ultimately, the robot or Artificial Intelligence (AI) if you wish to call it, would become faster, much more efficient, and probably far more intelligent than us, hopefully not. But is there a theoretical limit to how intelligent robotics can become? To the best of my knowledge, there may not be one, simply because as we pack in more complexities into a computer and larger and larger, the AI, it not only keeps and stores all the data, but it seems to outdo us. This is a frightening scenario I should imagine. Of course, some may disagree by questioning how AI could produce great works of art, how it could compose great symphonies or make great scientific and medical discoveries? But in my mind, I would reply to them that they can use their human brains to achieve the same as an IA, let alone outdo it.

Of course, a question like this comes from an ordinary non-scientific mind. But there are scientific geniuses who may not agree because they are the ones who can think and design scientific ideas, make discoveries and breakthroughs into technology far better than an ordinary person.

They attain their genius because the tiny atoms and molecules inside their brains are arranged in such a way by an Intelligent Designer, a Maker who is God, almost exactly like those tiny components being arranged inside powerful computers by an intelligent designer who is us.

There is actually nothing inside the brain of a scientific genius except just atoms and molecules, except how they were arranged. If we can arrange the atoms and molecules of a genius scientist, the same as they arrange the teeny-tiny components inside their AI they will (in my thinking) become even more intelligent than us.  If the components in their AI are not as tiny as those atoms and molecules in our brains, we can compensate for this by making our AI structurally larger and more robust.

Then my readers may argue with me that AI and computers can do what they are programmed to do. This is true. But I will answer back to my readers that their brains too are programmed by their genes to do the same. Part of our brain has been programmed by learning what we should do, and this is no different from a computer or AI.  My argument would be that if we can build a computer as intelligent as us, there is no limit to why an AI can be designed to be even more intelligent than us?

As a trained biological evolutionist this is exactly how we observe species getting better and better, more and more adaptable to environmental challenges through evolution for billions of years. It was a randomized arrangement of atoms and molecules of hit and miss into success. So would our brains do the same for AI evolution into more and more artificial intelligence.   

Ha! The next question my readers will challenge me would be the question: would AI become so intelligent they will replace us? I would retort, why couldn’t they be. If we can make them supersede in thinking, we can also program them to be just as kind as they are intelligent to us, not to destroy us even though they lack a soul except a physical body.

Perhaps in my worst night dreams they may keep us as their pets, and models to be refashioned again should we cease to exist in this world to do all the things we do to the other animals that too have the right to exist on this small planet of ours. Perhaps we need to be replaced as soon as possible so that other creatures less endowed with intelligence can live to regain their glory on Earth.

Allow me to conclude with this verse Jesus predicted to all mankind:

 Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth (Mathew 5:5)