In an interview during the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, Li Yanhong said, “Artificial intelligence is a great revo- lution comparable to the Industrial Revolution.” As the chairman of Baidu, Li Yanhong apparently dared not despise the enormous potential and profound influence of AI. As a celebrity, he hoped to remind the world to focus on this social change and make suggestions for government. However, Li Yanhong's estimate of AI is not good enough.
The industrial revolution has a profound influence on the world. First of all, it was an revolution of industry. Humanity stepped into the industrial civilization from the agricultural civilization, the social productive force began to leap, the social wealth increased rapidly, and people's living standards were changing every day, which triggered a population explosion. Secondly, the industrial revolution promoted the revolution in science and technology. The ideological revolution that began with the Renaissance was loaded with engine. The ability of human being to understand and transform the world began to explode. At the same time, the industrial revolution brought about a series of social and political revolutions. Capitalism eventually defeated feudalism and triggered a socialist revolution. The subsequent progress of civili- zation in the United States and Europe allowed them to launch a series of wars to conquer the world, which intensify the conflicts of civilization and accelerate the colonial wave in the world.
The influence of the industrial revolution on human civilization is incalculable, but it is only part of the progress of human civilization. The development of artificial intelligence may be the complete end of human civilization and a new stage of world evolution. The evolution of the world that began with the Big Bang can be divided into four stages: the stage of non-biological evolution, biological evolution, human evolution, and artificial intelligence evolution.
The 15 billion-year history of the world is an evolving history, and the evolution of the world is accelerating. The history before the emergence of the creature was more than 10 billion years, and the history of biology was only 3.8 billion years. The evolutionary speed of biological evolution has been slow during the first three billion years, and most outcomes have been from more than 500 million years ago after the Cambrian period. This degree of acceleration has been amazing, and the constant acceleration of human evolution is even more inconceivable. The evolution of humanity not only less than billion years, but it did not use 10 million years to rule the entire earth. The agricultural revolution was realized 8000 years ago. The industrial revolution was realized 200 years ago. In the 1960s, humans landed on the moon. In the 1990s, the Internet emerged. From the second wave, it entered the third wave, from the industry entered the information society and brought about knowledge explosions, infor- mation explosions and cultural explosions. This process of accelerating will undoubtedly continue, and it is not a linear acceleration. It is an exponential growth. Each exponential growth inevitably leads to abrupt change. For example, an atomic bomb explosion is an abrupt change caused by exponential growth.
Moore's Law increases the computing speed exponen- tially, and the obstacles to the evolution of AI are gradually eliminated. As a result, the level of AI rapidly mutates and can reach hundreds of millions of times of humanity within a few decades. Existing scientific predictions and scientific illusions have already described many beautiful pictures for us, but all these predictions are very conservative. Those who made these predictions did not think that future AI will be more than millions of billions times clever than people. All problems that humans are now suffering from will no longer be problems. In the future, new problems will be beyond human imagination and understanding, just as cats and dogs cannot understand human life.
The mutation in evolution first brought about changes of matter, just like the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and of course much larger. At the same time, the evolutionary mutation will also bring about a complete alienation, which means that people's power is lost, that is, the result of evolution may be a real disaster for people. For people living in modern society, the industrial revolution is the welfare of mankind, and it is the revolution of man as the subject's autonomous promotion and control. If you returned to the eighteenth century and chose whether or not to undergo the Industrial Revolution, no one would say that I do not want the Industrial Revolution. The nature of AI is completely different. It is initiated by people, but it will soon get rid of people's control. What people are doing is to cut the kite line or to hand over the keys of nuclear arsenal to others. It is not appropriate to view AI in the way of industrial revolution. Therefore, many famous world scientists like Hawking warned us to be alert to AI.
Of course, this does not mean that we should stop the development of AI, but that we should stand at a new height and perspective to evaluate and select, completing a different negative negation of thinking. The final choice may be the same, but the choice of welfare and disaster requires people's different rationality and responsi- bility.
The rule of AI instead of human is an evolution. We cannot stop the course of world evolution in order to safeguard human interests. In other words, our value standardshould be changed from humanism to evolutionism. Deng Xiaoping said, “Development is of overriding impor- tance.” Development is not only necessary for China, but also for the world. No matter how much pain and cost development brings, historical wheels of the world roll forward. Nobody can stop it.