Chapter 128: Artificial Intelligence
Xinghai’s Space Hub laboratory currently has only Fan Ren with an independent office.
Although the current space construction projects have greatly reduced construction costs due to the investment and operation of the space elevator, compared to construction on Blue Star’s home ground, the costs are still too high.
In the office, far outside the window is the space port, where several Young Dragon ships and other types of spaceships are docked at the port.
After A’dai entered, there was no sense of unfamiliarity. He walked to the window and looked at the huge and ugly Giant Elephant Class in the distance. Even with his personality that doesn’t care about appearances, he couldn’t help but twitch the corner of his mouth at this moment.
The boss’s aesthetic taste is truly indescribable.
He can design the domineering-looking Young Dragon class, and also not fear being ridiculed by designing this industrial monster with no sense of beauty.
Fan Ren watched him sighing in front of the window and knew what this guy was thinking.
Ever since the Giant Elephant Class was released, he had been complained about by many people because of its appearance.
But he didn’t care at all.
After all is said and done, just ask those port workers and masters responsible for loading and unloading; isn’t the loading and unloading work of cargo ships with the Giant Elephant Class layout convenient?
The answer is absolute.
In space, due to gravity, although there are many inconveniences in life, there is really one benefit.
That is, there is no need to arrange chairs in rooms like on the ground.
Fan Ren’s office also enjoys the influence of centrifugal force from rotation, with slight gravity that only keeps their feet slightly touching the ground, and their legs not bearing too much pressure at all.
At this moment, there is no need to sit down at all; just floating lightly like this is fine.
“Alright, tell me, explain your thoughts to me clearly.”
A’dai’s absent-mindedness during this period has a reason.
Whether it’s this guy’s exceptional talent or the buff from being bald, over these years, with the advent of graphene chips, this guy’s technology in this area has skyrocketed, to the point that even Fan Ren, with the system’s help, can’t fully grasp his depth.
As Xinghai’s chief scientist in this field, A’dai has the highest usage authority for the Xinghai Supercomputer.
Relying on this authority, he has been immersed in the artificial intelligence field for years. Not long ago, he mysteriously ran to Fan Ren and said something that shocked him to the core.
“Boss, our supercomputer seems to have developed preliminary self-awareness.”
Fan Ren remembers it very clearly; his first reaction was to immediately cut off all physical connections between the Xinghai Supercomputer and external equipment.
He knew what this meant.
The capabilities of the Xinghai Supercomputer are undoubtedly the top supercomputer in the world today, with computing power thousands of times greater than the former world’s number one supercomputer.
A large part of this is due to the ultra-low power consumption of graphene chips and the very low heat generation.
Furthermore, through the parallel architecture developed by A’dai, it is theoretically capable of unlimited chip concatenation work.
Precisely because of this, under the support of this massive computing power, technological development across various industries in Great Xia has been extremely rapid.
The mass production of nanorobots is also one of the achievements of the Xinghai Supercomputer.
Without this, the nanorobots produced in small quantities from the former laboratory output alone could not support Fan Ren’s research and development of the nano-coat.
Under A’dai’s explanation, Fan Ren realized that the matter wasn’t serious enough to warrant physical isolation.
What A’dai meant by having a certain self-awareness was merely that, under specific environmental conditions, the artificial intelligence model he designed would self-upgrade its code.
Of course, these specific conditions are extremely harsh.
The cause was that when A’dai initially set up the model, he had inserted a string of code whose purpose was to allow the AI model to gain permissions through this code to upgrade its own code library afterward.
But this code was prohibited by Fan Ren from the very beginning.
A’dai didn’t object at the time; he still listened to Fan Ren and deleted that string of code right away.
However, at that time, the AI model had already entered the trial operation phase, so even though this string of code was deleted from the underlying database, it had still been learned by the AI.
Of course, this wouldn’t affect usage.
However, a while ago, when A’dai was using the supercomputer to process computation problems, he was surprised to discover that the AI artificial intelligence undergoing deep learning in the supercomputer actually proactively submitted an application, requesting to re-add this original code that A’dai had deleted back into the database, so that it could better upgrade and update itself.
This request was rejected by A’dai at the time.
Immediately after, he was reported to Fan Ren, which led to Fan Ren’s plan to physically isolate the supercomputer out of fright.
Fan Ren had received ‘instruction’ from the system on IT-related knowledge; although he wasn’t as exceptionally talented as A’dai in this area, his understanding of related technologies was not low at all.
He had his own views on AI development.
In his view, with the development of technology, because the human brain’s information processing capacity is always limited, more and more information processing work must be handed over to computers.
And with the birth of artificial intelligence models, it has even developed to the point where, under pre-set rules, it can complete many higher-privilege command operations.
But no matter what, these artificial intelligence products are fundamentally tools used by humans.
Tools do not have self-awareness; all their ‘thoughts’ are completed within the frameworks pre-set by humans.
Once artificial intelligence with self-awareness enters human society, relying on computing power far exceeding humans by countless times, AI could even lay out plans far in advance to prepare for some future interest demands it needs.
And humanity might be completely unaware of it.
The risks involved are incalculable. (Note 1)
As time progresses, intelligent products will enter thousands of households, from small things like switches to large public transportation vehicles like cars and airplanes. If, in this process, because of this string of code, they develop self-awareness, then countless domains in the future could be threatened by artificial intelligence.
Moreover, under the opponent’s incredibly powerful computing power layout, humanity might be completely unaware. (Note: 1)
With self-awareness, there will absolutely be its own interest demands.
So who can guarantee that artificial intelligence will always choose to make sacrifices in the face of its own interest demands, thereby ensuring humanity’s interests?
After all, it has self-awareness.
Self-awareness has always been the prerequisite overriding all external factors.
For example, a scholar once introduced it like this:
How can you distinguish whether the world you are in is real or just a dream? And even after waking from the dream, whether the world you are in is still real or still in a dream.
The scholar’s answer was:
In this process, as long as you keep questioning the reality of the current world, this questioning itself is the most real form of self-awareness.
Precisely because of this, perhaps humanity can override AI artificial intelligence models, commanding them hundreds or millions of times to make choices aligned with human values and interests.
But as long as it has self-awareness, there is absolutely the possibility that it will generate ideas for its own interest demands and put them into action.
Note 1: In the current stage of artificial intelligence development, there is a concept of using large models to learn various meteorological data, thereby enabling meteorological intervention.
The concept is similar to the butterfly effect.
