A future is painted where man becomes unnecessary

 

Wolfgang Hansson

 

After the pandemic, new threats are waiting  

 

Published: Less than 2 hours ago  

 

Updated: Less than 20 min ago  

 

This is a commenting text. Analysis and positions are the writer's.  

 

COLUMNISTS  

 

When it hit it completely turned all of our lives upside down for several years. But when the WHO declares that the pandemic is over, it is hardly noticed.  

 

We live in a time when threats to humanity are on a queue like low pressure over the North Atlantic.  

 

Now the focus is on the next, and then I'm not talking about climate change. 

 

I remember how we were sent home from the workplace one afternoon in March with the order not to return for a few weeks. 

 

It was considerably longer. For over a year, I and millions of people across the planet worked from home to protect ourselves against a previously unknown virus. 

 

Societies all over the world were completely paralyzed. Schools were closed. Shelves were cleaned on toilet paper. A daily struggle was waged to obtain protective equipment for the healthcare workers. Elderly people died needlessly because the authorities failed to keep the virus out of nursing homes. 

 

We followed the "top lists" of which countries were the worst and best when it came to the number of deaths in relation to the population. We argued about whether mouthguards were good or not. 

 

Above all, we kept our distance. Queues at intervals of one and a half meters wound out onto the streets from Systembolaget and other shops.  

 

We slavishly followed the Public Health Authority's recommendations and the researchers succeeded through heroic efforts in producing a vaccine in record time.  

 

Everything we did was totally dominated by the corona pandemic.  

 

At least five million people around the world died from covid. Many experts believe that the real figure is several times higher. 

 

 

The pandemic is over. Photo: Henrik Holmberg / TT  

Time of disorder 

 

That's why it felt almost silly when the World Health Organization,

WHO,

declared on Friday that the pandemic was over. Covid-19 is now an infectious disease among all others.  

 

A message that lacked drama and was therefore met with silence by most media. Perhaps a small notice on page 23 of the paper newspaper or a short telegram in a radio broadcast.  

 

Disinterest in short. It seems that people preferred not to be reminded of the hell that haunted the world from the beginning of 2020 until recently.  

 

Maybe it's not disinterest but just a survival strategy. Because after the pandemic came new threats. First there was Russia's invasion of Ukraine, where dictator Putin has been flaunting his nuclear weapons. We still don't know how it will end. 

 

We live in a time of disorder where it feels like the stability and security we have long taken for granted in the Western world is about to be taken away from us. 

 

Climate change, which existed as a long-term threat, is now also a short-term one. But right now it is artificial intelligence, AI, that is being painted as the new danger to humanity. 

 

Artificial intelligence, AI, is portrayed as the new danger for humanity.  Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto  

Bigger than the internet 

 

Not a day goes by without me coming across several articles warning of the dangers of machines becoming smarter than humans and somehow taking over control.  

 

There is talk of a shift in human development that is bigger than the internet, the steam engine and all the other decisive discoveries that man has made in the past. 

 

Interestingly, these reports of alarm come not primarily from activists or generally concerned laymen, but from some of the world's foremost experts on AI.  

 

In my world, it started with the letter that

Elon Musk

, Max Tegmark and others wrote where they warned of the consequences of AI if it was not regulated before the research got too far. Development is going furiously fast. They proposed a worldwide halt to all AI development for at least six months while a more thorough assessment of the risks was carried out.  

 

But even the letter writers do not seem to believe in the realism of their advice. They will not stop development. During the pandemic, many advocated the precautionary principle. Since we couldn't be sure how the virus spread and how dangerous it was, more or less everything should be shut down. Something that subsequently proved to have fatal consequences in countries that followed that advice.  

Attracts and frightens  

 

Perhaps this is why I hear few advocate the precautionary principle when it comes to AI.  

 

Because as scary as AI can appear, it is just as enticing.  

 

Used correctly, AI can help us solve the climate issue and a number of other challenges facing humanity. Perhaps AI can give us a breakthrough in the development of clean fusion energy so that it becomes commercially viable and thus can solve humanity's energy problems.  

 

The possibilities are endless. But so are the risks.  

 

Unfortunately, there are always people and states with evil intentions. They can use the AI to cause great damage. In the future, disinformation and influence campaigns will be even more difficult to counter and pose a threat to democracy. 

 

Even without malicious intentions, new technology always has both positive and negative effects. Some of the negatives we only discover afterwards when it is too late.  

 

Many of the doomsday prophecies with AI are that the new technology threatens jobs. A future is painted where man becomes unnecessary. In that case, what does it do to our psychological well-being?  

Reshuffle  

 

I don't really know how worried one should be, but the fact that the experts who are involved in developing the new technology are the ones who wave the warning flag most intensively is still food for thought.  

 

One thing is clear. As little as we realized before the age of the internet and the mobile phone how it would completely change our lives, we have just as little idea of how AI will completely rearrange our existence. 

 

Suddenly, a future pandemic doesn't feel like the biggest threat to humanity.