The Ultimate Danger of Artificial Intelligence
Manuel L. Zapata, P.E.
©2025
Much has been said about the dangers that lie ahead resulting from the increasing use of artificial intelligence. It is true that artificial intelligence has created, and will continue to create, many disruptions in our jobs, how we make decisions, and more importantly how we interact with each other. However, as important as these concerns are, there is an even greater threat posed by AI about which very little has been said. This threat is the potential impact of AI on the survival of our species. Yes, you read that correctly, the survival of the human species. Ironically, the demise of the human species may come about because of our desire to achieve immortality. How can this happen? What are the forces that will lead us to our demise?
There are three areas of scientific work, powered by artificial intelligence, which may lead us to our eventual demise. These three areas are DNA alterations using CRISPER, our transformation into cyborgs, and the creation of Sentient Robotic Entities, SREs, or robots equipped with an electronic copy of a human brain.
Using a new laboratory tool called CRISPR, scientists can cut a DNA strand and insert DNA from another source, thus creating a totally new DNA segment. Artificial Intelligence has played a key role in the development of this technology, reducing the trial-and-error process of gene editing. This gene editing work has great medical potential for curing diseases that have resisted medical intervention, like sickle cell anemia which is now being treated with CRISPR.(1) The Secretary General of the Swedish Academy upon awarding the Nobel Prize to the creators of CRISPR said, they had created a way to rewrite the code of life.
CRISPR can be used to alter the DNA of any living organism and may cause unintentional and potentially irreversible effects, which could lead to catastrophic events in ecosystems and the food chain. However, the most serious danger is the desire, at some point in the near future, to use CRISPR to create enhanced versions of human beings with augmented physical capabilities and without deficient components. This desire to create an enhanced human being has been around for some time. CRISPR now gives us the capability to do so.(2) Nature took millions of years of evolution to produce modern humans. Can we do as good a job working only a few days in the laboratory?
We need to ask ourselves if we, as a society, will be able to resist the temptation to improve the design of a human being? The answer is probably not, and we will have to learn to live with enhanced humans around us. We, regular humans, will continue to exist and suffer from our typical illnesses and deficiencies. Enhanced humans will be free of these problematic conditions, but they will suffer from two conditions we regular humans have to endure, accidents and aging. This exposure to accidents and aging will push enhanced humans to accelerate the development of advanced cyborg technology.
Cyborgs are cybernetic organisms made up of both biological and artificial components with the goal of increasing, or correcting, the capabilities of the biological parts. There are already millions of cyborgs around us, these are individuals who have been implanted with replacement hips and knees, pacemakers, defibrillators, and automatic insulin pumps just to name a few medical miracles. These individuals are the beginning of our transformation into cyborgs. There has already been a lot of progress implanting brain-computer interfaces, BCIs, to help patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease and various types of paralysis. This research has been very successful and is now moving from clinical research to production with the work done at Neuralink. In March 2024, the company announced that a patient suffering from paralysis had been able to interact with a computer using only his thoughts. The company also has plans to develop BCIs to address other medical problems like addictions, deafness, and blindness. (3)
Once these medical needs are addressed, it will be a straightforward step to transform CRISPR-enhanced humans into advanced cyborgs by implanting chips in their brains, granting them superhuman computational capabilities. Currently, work is being done to produce Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) to implant into human volunteers, connecting them to a large computer network. Their brains will be just another node in the IOT, the Internet of Things. (4)
During the transformation of enhanced humans into cyborgs, the planet will experience a large decrease in the number of people on earth. A study conducted by Dr. Dean Spears of the University of Texas indicates that the world population will peak at about 10 billion by the year 2085. (5) After that, there will be a sharp decline, almost vertically, in the number of people worldwide. The population decrease will be driven by people choosing to have fewer or no children at all. This situation poses a problem because the global economy requires both labor and capital to function successfully. We will have plenty of capital, but the world will have a significant shortage of labor.
The population decline will force an increase in the assembly of robots dedicated to making the goods the economy now produces and also to provide services to an aging population. At first, Narrow AI will control these robots; however, as the human population continues to decrease, we will need to create more advanced robots and equip them with Artificial General Intelligence. These robots will have the capability to understand, learn, adapt, and apply their knowledge, like a human being, to a wide range of problems. The decrease in the number of humans and cyborgs will also press for the development of the next step in AI, what computer scientists call Theory of Mind AI. This system will understand how humans think and feel and will recognize that humans have desires, intentions, beliefs, and other such feelings. This more developed form of AI will make the robots act in a more human like manner facilitating their interactions with cyborgs and humans.
As capable as these future robotic systems may appear, they are still missing a critical element in their software. These robots will not know who or what they are, they will only know how to execute what they have been programmed to do. Scientists, however, are actively engaged in reaching the ultimate goal in the field of AI, the creation of a sentient machine, a machine that has feelings, consciousness, and self-awareness. This is still considered an impossible task, however, given the speed of development in the field of Artificial Intelligence it is not inconceivable that we may create this system in the very near future. Work is already underway to develop such a Sentient System but is kept under wraps for competitive reasons. CNN reported on July 25, 2022, that Google had fired an engineer for claiming he had already created a sentient machine. (6)
At some point, during this process of change, cyborgs will realize that their vulnerabilities, as well as their failure points, are their biological components. This understanding will press them to start an accelerated program to replace as many of their biological organs with mechanical and electronic parts.
During this stage of change, the cyborgs will also ask themselves, not “who” they are, but “what” they are and will come to recognize that they are only a collection of knowledge, experiences, likes-and-dislikes, opinions, and other idiosyncrasies stored in their aging human brains. This answer will lead them to the unavoidable recognition of their own mortality. Silicon Valley billionaires are very interested in attaining immortality and are funding ventures aimed at life extension. Cyborgs in the future, like their Silicon Valley ancestors, will also be infused with the idea of immortality. However, after tapping into all that CRISPR has to offer, and using cyborg technology to the limit, the expiration date of their human brains will not change, and they will still have to come face to face with their own death.
To confront this challenge, and attain immortality, cyborgs, like Doctor Faust in the famous opera of Gounod, will enter into a pact, not with the devil, but with Artificial Intelligence itself. Cyborgs will build digital twins of themselves by storing the contents of their brains into a database in the cloud. At the same time, they will expedite research and development in the field of AI to create what I call a Sentient Robotic Entity, or SRE. These machines will have consciousness, will be self-aware, and will be able to say, on their own, without being programmed, “Cogito, ergo sum,” I think, therefore I am, echoing Rene Descartes’ famous assertion.
Once this AI development goal is achieved, the cyborgs will transfer the contents of their brains into these new SREs, and we will transition into a full robotic society. If there are still some humans around, they will become extinct because the SRE society will not be interested in providing what humans need for their survival, and we humans will become part of the now ongoing Sixth Extinction. The Sentient Robotic Entities, SREs, will become a living organism, a new species that will dominate the planet.
How close are we to this scenario? Closer than you might want to believe. There are already plenty of robots programmed to move and act like humans, or better. Visit the site of Boston Dynamics and see for yourself. These robots are just waiting for the installation of the sentient software in their systems to become Sentient Robotic Entities, and when this happens, we will enter the Post-Human Society.
- WIRED, December 19, 2023
- The New York Times Magazine, August 12, 2022
- The New York Times, January 29, 2024
- Neuroscience, September 14, 2017
- The New York Times, September 18, 2023
- The Economist, interview, April 28, 2023