CS220AU-DP-2022

A Personal Exploration of Artificial Intelligence and Existential Risks


About

Hello & Welcome!

I’m Hannah, 21 years old and I’m currently in my third year studying Digital Transformation in Business and Society with focus on Information Systems and Digital Communication. This website was created as part of a project for the course “Navigating the Digital World” at the University of Essex in the autumn semester 2022. The whole project was themed “How are digital identities connected to existential risks?” and the aim was to explore digital identities, existential risks as well as critical thinking.

Within this webpage I want to share my thought-process about digital identitites, existential risks and AI. It should be therefore a platform, for me to develop some knowledge and personal skills, share my thoughts and if you like to, get in touch about that topic. If you want to know what I learned for myself by creating this website, you can have a look at my personal development site here.

Enjoy! :)

Findings

Digital identity is essentially any personal data existing online that can be traced back to the real you (blog.avast.com). Existential risks are a complex topic, as there are entire papers that only deal with the definition of “existential risks”, but in general one could say that an existential risk is one that threatens the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development. Examples are nuclear war, biotechnology and genetics and artificial intelligence. Most interesting and for me also most important was the risk of AI, as it’s a field that’s made significant strides in recent years. Artificial intelligence is a constellation of many different technologies working together to enable machines to sense, comprehend, act, and learn with human-like levels of intelligence. It is used already in many different ways in our daily life and can be differentiated in three stages: Artificial narrow (or “weak”) Intelligence, Artificial general (or “strong”) Intelligence and Artificial Superintelligence. Right now I am at the point where it cannot be said that AI in general poses an existential risk, but only the most extreme part of it: the Artificial Superintelligence….

Further ideas for research

… But I have the thesis, that even “normal” AI can pose a threat to humanity if it is abused for example in politics. This is also the state of research I am currently working on (see Blogpost 6 - AI as an indirect Influence on Existential Risks).
The connection between digital identities and the existential risk of AI still has to be worked out with literature and a blog post created. My thesis is that because AI learns from existing patterns, we can influence learning and thus the effects of AI with our digital identities and our online behavior - both positively and negatively.

Blogposts

Feedback / Contact

If you still have questions, feel free to contact me via the following channels:

If you like, you are also very welcome to leave feedback!
I am open to constructive criticism, suggestions for improvement and other views, as I think this is a topic that can be better understood through discourse.