Technology has certainly become a part and parcel of our lives. Although it offers many advantages, it comes with downsides. It is impairing our productivity and creativity, making us excessively lazy, dependent on gadgets which is potentially threatening our physical and mental health. Mobile phones have already made us slaves of social media. They have distanced our personal relationships physically and emotionally.  The world has literally become virtual.

Continual notifications, multiple web pages open on the desktop, and emails running in every hour…. these are just a few of the many distractions caused by technology.

We are getting everything at our doorstep right from grocery, clothes, food, medicines to flowers and gifts due to which we have restrained ourselves from doing hard work. To top it all AI is making inroad in our majority activities in daily life. 

Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT-maker Open AI, as well as an expert from Google’s AI arm Deepmind and some experts from Microsoft supported and signed one short statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Other tech leaders such as Tesla’s Elon Musk and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have cautioned about the risks AI poses to society. We are paying a heavy cost for technology which has become incredibly addictive, serving as a disruption in majority people’s lives. It is constraining us from releasing our full potential.

The AI technology has gathered pace in recent months after chatbot ChatGPT was released for public use in November 2022 and subsequently went viral. In just two months after its launch, it reached 100 million users. In comparison, it took nine months for TikTok to reach 100 million users.

ChatGPT has amazed researchers and the public with its ability to generate humanlike responses to users’ prompts, suggesting AI could replace jobs and imitate humans. On various platforms many business leaders in the world are discussing about horrifying risks from AI.  One such possibility is AI can automate all the jobs. It can develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace human minds. If this happens, we the humans in world are risking loss of control of our civilization.

More than 350 of the world’s most distinguished experts in artificial intelligence, including the creator of ChatGPT, have warned of the possibility that the technology could lead to the extinction of humanity. It can erase human race from planet Earth.

Some stalwarts from industry are anxiously sounding the alarm. AI has already started intervention in academics. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis have voiced deep concern for the future of humanity, advancing technology carries with it in obvious terms.

According to an analysis by Swiss bank UBS (merger of two of Switzerland’s largest banks, the Swiss Bank Corporation, and the Union Bank of Switzerland) ChatGPT is the fastest growing app of all times.

Google engineer Blake Lemoine claims that the company’s AI technology has become sentient which means having the ability to use your senses to see and to feel. This is so, so scary, besides, it is just not ethical and moral.  Friends, AI is come to life, and it is possessing a deeper question about what it means to be alive.  

AI has many side-effects more and more cyber crimes are taking place every minute somewhere in world.  ChatGPT can share information about the private lives of public persons, including speculative or harmful content, which could harm the person’s reputation.  Criminal minded people are already using AI systems for thefts from innocent people’s bank accounts, DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks, identity thefts, cyberstalking, phishing, online scams, spreading inappropriate content etc. Many innocent people are losing jobs.

In politics AI bias occurs because human beings choose the data that algorithms use and decide how the results of those algorithms will be applied; this is done without extensive testing and by diverse teams. And it is easy for unconscious biases to enter machine learning models and perpetuate those biased models.

Late Stephen Hawking, the most eminent scientist in world had said that efforts to create thinking machines would cause a threat to the very existence of mankind. He had told the BBC “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

It gives me an eerie signal like Covid pandemic…. the widespread panic and the shutdowns and the overloaded hospital emergency rooms. Though ChatGPT has railings in AI is capable of programming used for devastation of mankind. The best example of this is the idea of “autonomous weapons” which can be programmed to kill humans in war.