How Do Humans Live With The Intelligent World?

Since the three quarter of 2019, a number of third party big data company executives have been taken away by the police to assist in the investigation. Using big data and AI technology to provide system, data and collection for platform loan platform is not only a concentrated outbreak of personal privacy and data security problems, but also a microcosm of human crisis in the era of intelligence.

On the one hand, the exponential growth of digitalization, automation and intelligent technology has brought mankind into an exciting era of prosperity. On the other hand, robots, artificial intelligence, bioengineering and genetics are not bound to infiltrate and integrate human life and even human beings, which will eventually lead to systematic neglect of the basic principles of human existence. Gold Leonhard, a futurist, describes the situation of human in "man machine conflict - how human and intelligent world coexist". "We are in a mixture of heaven and hell, which is called HellVen."

In his view, the basic logic of human-machine conflict is that the Moore's law of information technology has expanded to many fields, but human morality, culture and social system have not been exponentially increased. The development of AI is faster than Moore's law, and this contrast and conflict will be bigger and bigger.

In this way, not only technology has been developed from strengthening nature to replacing nature, but human brain algorithm is also being replaced by various intelligent rational computation, and even human has become the object of control of these technology products. When the existing ethical civilization and values on earth can not keep pace with technology, human basic dignity will be challenged unprecedentedly.

The biggest driving force of "human-machine conflict" is driven by huge commercial interests. Leonhard pointed out that the use of technological index development characteristics to connect the public, providing cheap and addictive mobile devices, may be the biggest business ever. In this regard, because of the ability to create trillions of dollars of business every year, data has indeed become a new oil. Companies that tap resources from big data and internet society are rapidly becoming the new generation of Exxon Mobil Oil Corp, and can not wait to provide new opium for the masses. In Leonhard's words, "if the ability to collect data is magnified by AI and the Internet of things one thousand times, you will be able to hear their counting notes."

"People are sick, do they know?" In the ethical dilemma brought by this technological change and business interests, Leonhard thinks that human beings have become victims of digital schizophrenia, digital obesity and digital syndrome. All index technologies including artificial intelligence, bioengineering and cognitive computing, especially when human genes enter the state of digital obesity, and then want to lose weight, return to the previous mode of life is very difficult. We will become more and more like machines in order to better adapt to the mechanized world, such as a large number of points, commentaries, and friends, it is easy for people to indulge themselves. People have endured too many meaningless relationships, and offline life has become a new luxury.

Human beings are always unable to resist the temptation of efficiency. Leonhard cautioned that we will eventually be dominated by a huge machine operating system, which is constantly learning from itself and giving feedback to us to guide it to no longer require input from us. At that time, our value will be lower than the technology we created and trained.

The book "human-machine conflict" puts forward 5 new human rights such as "the right to protect the natural physiological state", "the right to be inefficient", "the right to break the network" and so on. It also puts forward 15 things that should not be done and 9 principles. But how do we protect these rights and principles? How can we motivate people to recognize these rights and principles? But still Utopian wishful thinking.

From the perspective of economics, due to the strong negative externalities, ethical issues have become the most serious tragedy of the Commons in the age of intelligence.

Facing the unprecedented human crisis, the first thing to do is to set up an ethics committee that adaptable to the smart age. For example, China formally established the national science and technology ethics committee in July 2019. However, the author believes that more crucial is the need to integrate morality into the development process of human intelligence and synchronize with the technology of exponential growth.

Leonhard also suggested in his book that all index type technologies, including artificial intelligence, bioengineering, cognitive computing, especially human gene editing, should be considered as an ethical criterion. This refers not only to the criteria of inventors or creators to embed the machine in a meticulous or unintentional way, but also the criteria that machine may learn and evolve autonomously over time.

But that is still far from enough. As Bezos said, we need to focus on the changeless places. Human nature remains unchanged. Ethics, as a mechanism for managing human nature evolved over a long period of time, and how to evolve in the man-machine conflict to solve these important problems, I am afraid I have to go back to the exploration of human nature and ethics itself. So, rather than the humanistic crisis in the age of intelligence, it is rather a new mission of ethics concerning human destiny.