How many thoughts does a person have during one day?
Google says:
Every day, our minds are flooded with a constant stream of thoughts, ranging from mundane daily tasks to deeper contemplations about life and the world around us. According to research, the average person has approximately 60,000 thoughts per day.
That question is currently on my mind, but why? I have no clue why, but it occurs to me that with 8 billion people on planet Earth, there is a lot of thinking going on. Imagine if this thing called Artificial Intelligence (AI) could harness all the thinking going on worldwide. Would the genie in the computer be able to bring about world peace? Or cure all sicknesses? Indeed, that would be a dream come true. Perhaps someday we will build a computer with enough memory to accomplish feats like the ones mentioned. What if scientists discovered a way to link all human brains together to preclude the need to build a computer large enough to hold all the thoughts in the world? That might be easier to accomplish than trying to make something that is mechanical into which every human’s brain content could be transferred. Think about the loss of thought that would occur the day after the first brain dump occurred, and today humanity has a new set of thoughts.
Maybe the tequila over ice I drank last evening planted this conversation in my mind. Or, perhaps it is the fact that I spent an hour reading about AI yesterday to understand just how and why AI is so dangerous. Actually, what I learned is that AI will not take over the world by itself like a god but will be used as a tool to help people do their jobs. As I write this, I am using AI in the form of Grammarly to correct my lousy punctuation and grammar. What I am learning is that Grammarly has a writing style that is unlike my own, and I don’t like the changes it suggests about seventy percent of the time. I like to use extra words using my street vocabulary to inject my personality into a piece, but AI chooses to eliminate many of my adjectives for the purpose of making the writing clearer.
Eventually, AI will indeed take over the world and cause many people pain, just as every social revolution has in the past. People will lose their current jobs and will need to adapt to make a living. Or, they will beg and plead with the government to throw them a safety net in some form of a handout to save them from looking for new work. It isn’t going to be pretty, and I am glad it will not affect me. I will, however, be affected by the suffering I will see. As a Lion, it will afford me many new opportunities to serve my community. For every negative, there is a positive. Will we be smart enough to identify the opportunities, or will we need AI to do it for us? And if we do have to use AI to find the opportunities, so what? Isn’t that why AI has been invented in the first place?
Filed under: Aging, Education, Government, Science | Tagged: Artificial Intelligence, Social Revolution | 3 Comments »
