Opinion | World at a crossroads: extinction or a new AI-enabled civilisation?

Name: What if robots took over the world? One ‘imagines’ nightmare scenario
Uploaded: 2024-01-31T09:30:17.000Z
Duration: 3 min 8 s
Description: What if robots took over the world? One ‘imagines’ nightmare scenario

Amid war and climate change, the only hope may lie with machines that exceed human intelligence – but not every outcome will be desirable for us

Reading Time:3 minutes

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A digitally generated image of a glass brain. One possibility is the emergence of a synthesised, human-machine civilisation, where humans directly interact with more intelligent machines to create everything we or they can imagine. Photo: Getty Images

Key-young Son

Published: 5:30pm, 31 Jan 2024Updated: 9:50am, 1 Feb 2024

Wars, climate change and artificial intelligence (AI) were the three key concerns at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Across the world, there is a growing belief that AI will fundamentally change the way we live – if we live to see it. Yet climate change or nuclear war might also make it impossible for humans – or other creatures – to live on Earth.

In other words, we are at the crossroads of a mass extermination and the rise of a new civilisation. Some might say we are on the doorstep of a New Axial Age.

German philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the term, Axial Age, to describe the world’s transition from the Iron Age to classical antiquity and, especially, new religious revolutions in the first millennium BC. It was axial because the civilisational foundations of humanity were thought to have been laid in China, India, Persia, Judea and Greece simultaneously.

Neo-axialism is not new. The Renaissance, for instance, was an effort to revive and refine the ideas and achievements of classical antiquity, represented by the Greco-Roman period. Coupled with the Industrial Revolution, the cultural movement in the 15th and 16th centuries marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity.

The dawn of modernity brought about a profound transformation in the way we lived in most areas, encompassing art, architecture, literature, religion, politics, society, science and technology. The new age opened after the crisis of the Late Middle Ages, marked by the Great Famine, Black Death, Little Ice Age, Hundred Years’ War and decline of the Holy Roman Empire.

But our 21st century crisis is even bigger. Global warming and rising sea levels will wipe out significant portions of major cities across the world within the century. The extreme fluctuations between drought and flooding, or extreme weather like the winter storms that have been pummelling much of the United States and other countries, will make many parts of the Earth uninhabitable. Russia’s war on Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war could spill over and spread into much bigger wars involving the great powers.

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What if robots took over the world? One ‘imagines’ nightmare scenario

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.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;}Amid war and climate change, the only hope may lie with machines that exceed human intelligence – but not every outcome will be desirable for us

Amid war and climate change, the only hope may lie with machines that exceed human intelligence – but not every outcome will be desirable for us