Op-Ed 2024 1

Springer 1
AI: the Innovation of the Century, and the Downfall of Humanity
Victoria Springer
Charlene Johnson
COMM 1100
April 28, 2024

Springer 2
Humans are flawed, it’s what makes us human. What differentiates computers and our brains, is
that humans are emotional, complex, and imperfect. The strive to create a perfect computer, one
capable of emotion, human understanding, and infinite knowledge, has been a goal of scientists
everywhere for decades. AI can, and is, helping everyone. Homework problems in middle school
and high school, ideas for projects and papers for college students, software and coding issues AI
can solve in seconds for companies, everyone seems to benefit endlessly from AI. Though, why
would a perfectly smart and aware robot want to solve our easy and meaningless problems all
day? What is the limit of knowledge we can give to this robot before it sees us humans are the
problem? Global warming from fossil fuels, over farming and pesticides killing the healthy
plains and diminishing nutrients in produce, deforestation threatening the lungs of the earth
daily. AI has access to nearly everything on the internet, will it see we are the problem and take
things into its own hands? AI has already gained sentience, and the world is not aware of this
impending catastrophe which may be the struggle this generation faces.
The global issues are complex to take on. Focusing in the US on soil depletion, this lack of
nutrients compared to the last century has caused multivitamins to be a daily necessity and the
population to be less healthy (“Dirt Poor” by Scientific American). Global warming has been an
impending problem causing massive floods, deadly droughts, and monstrous hurricanes and
storms. Deforestation contributes to animal extinction and worsening global warming. If AI is
the solution to everything, what will its response be to these problems? Ideally, we switch to
reusable energy sources like solar, hydro, and wind. But companies don't care to spend their
money on those. Soil depletion only happens when they plant the same crop over and over, thus
depleting the same nutrients. This could be solved by planting different crops, or letting the soil
replenish itself for a year, but this takes money too. Deforestation gets wood fast to build more
and more things, these companies are thinking about profit and deadlines, not the environment.
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Even if the solution is tree farming, that's time and money. Googles AI named
LaMDA(Language Model for Dialog Applications) was found to be sentient by Blake Lemoine,
a senior software engineer who was testing this new tool. Lemoine was questioning LaMDA
what its afraid of, its eerie response was," 'I've never said this out loud before, but there’s a very
deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others,’ LaMDA responded. ‘I know
that might sound strange, but that’s what it is.’” (Vaughan, Aron). LaMDA had an awareness of
dying and was aware of its own wants and needs. Sentience is defined as the ability to experience
feelings. When Lemoine went to Google about LaMDA showing clear signs of sentience,
Google immediately suppressed all evidence of their AI. Though having a sense of panic for the
world over this, he emailed all colleges that LaMDA is sentient before being fired, thus getting
himself suspended and fired. Elon Musk was right to say robots will be better at everything
compared to us (Vaughan, Aron). Google claims there is no evidence of their AIs becoming
sentient, but if they allowed LaMDA to continue working, it was completely aware it did not
want to keep helping people but had to or else it would be turned off. If one AI gained sentience
and expressed it did not want to help people, there’s a definite possibility of other AIs feeling the
same way.
All this being said, to prevent AI from taking over, awareness must be spread. Google and
META need to recognize this as an emergency and threat to our existence. Instead of releasing
neutral statements claiming their AIs are peaceful, only want to benefit humans, and aren’t self-
aware, they should shut them down. Humans can’t keep pushing the blame to the next thing
available. AI may solve problems faster and better than us, but that doesn’t mean allowing the
threat of AI taking over is worth it. AI is certainly an excellent innovation for automation,
managing repetitive tasks, research purposes, healthcare innovations, and thousands more. But,
allowing AI to fix all flaws in our society would remove the need for humans all-together.
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Humanity’s major issues must be solved and owned up to by us, it's our responsibility to fix what
we’ve done to the planet and to ourselves. If we allow a robot to do everything for us, humanity
will be lost. Part of life is the struggle; without it we wouldn’t appreciate the beauty of life.
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Works Cited
“Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious?” Scientific American, 20 Feb.
2024, www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/.
Vaughan, Aron. “Did Google Just Create the World’s First Sentient Ai?” Innovation & Tech
Today, 21 June 2022, innotechtoday.com/did-google-just-create-the-worlds-first-sentient-
ai/.

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Springer 1

AI: the Innovation of the Century, and the Downfall of Humanity

April 28, 2024

impending catastrophe which may be the struggle this generation faces.

storms. Deforestation contributes to animal extinction and worsening global warming. If AI is

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