An Orwellian future or humane IR5.0?

THERE is no sense that everyone is ready for the fourth industrial revolution (IR4.0) yet – even as futurists start to trumpet the coming of IR5.0. Perhaps, it makes sense to slow down for just a moment and contemplate deeper and more critically on what all of this entails to humanity.

Every defensive driver knows that one's foot should be closer to the brake pedal than the accelerator. So when it comes to powerful ideologies that envelop the world, our critical mind and wisdom should play the role of the "brake pedal".

IR4.0, as we know, is all about the proliferation of cyber-physical systems. These systems aggregate data about every object and event in the physical world, analyse it to find intricate and subtle patterns and produce a solution that can be applied back to the physical world – very often without human intervention and using robotics powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

The phrase "IR5.0" is just starting to appear among academia and industry practitioners but remains a vague and inchoate mass of ideas.

A brief thematic analysis of IR5.0 mentions that it is expected to be about "closer cooperation between humans and machines" or even a "combination" of the two. Most of these IR5.0 mentions do not specify how close this cooperation or combination will be but humans and machines are to "dance together, metaphorically" in IR5.0.

However, more details slipped through in the World Economic Forum (WEF) content, one of the most vocal platforms for such ideology.

A word-for-word quote from one of WEF's videos says: "The very idea of the human being some sort of natural concept is really going to change. Our bodies will become so high-tech that we will not be able to distinguish between what is natural and what is artificial".

This is not mere speculation. There already exists a cluster of technologies in development to connect machines and the human brain on a very deep level –not just for therapeutic use, but also for lifestyle and commercial purposes. And all of this is going to be powered by AI, of course.

According to the industry observers, the highest-profile investors in these technologies are Facebook, Google, Amazon and Elon Musk's Neuralink.

These technologies are still nascent but have great potential of becoming that foundational platform for the IR5.0 or the "neuro-quantified" era (as Kernel founder Bryan Johnson described it), for example, implantable brain-machine interfaces, nano-sensors, tiny AI, genomic and gene editing, quantum computers, to list a few.

For now, there are some breakthroughs in establishing the connection from our brain to machines. Once the opposite direction is established, the widespread "implantable technologies for health and other purposes" (Regenesys, 2020) may become our day-to-day reality sooner than we might imagine.

However, should not the very idea of merging AI with human intelligence on such a deep physical level (in the form of implantable technologies) rather than being metaphorical at least concern us, especially its "other" potential uses? After all, technology can be a potentially powerful tool for control and manipulation.

Furthermore, stepping into a domain which to date solely belongs to God should at least raise some eyebrows. Every major religion mandates no change to be made to God's creations – and the human is one of his most sophisticated and sacred.

In the same line, both atheists and religious individuals alike already question how far AI will go. After all, anything "artificial" has no heart, soul, sympathy, empathy, wisdom or self-sacrifice – elements necessary to form human intelligence.

AI has undoubtedly learned a great deal of how to transform data into information and even knowledge. However, the highest processed form of information for a human being is not knowledge. It is wisdom! Wisdom requires not only known facts and semantics of the physical world but rather the knowledge of unseen universal laws.

Those unseen universal laws and unseen connections seem to be encoded in the human soul (out of AI's reach) – an ephemeral and mysterious substance that makes humans choose to do the right thing even if it is difficult or even self-detrimental. We call this moral-ethical integrity.

Let us illustrate this with an example.

Imagine a war. A soldier looks out of a trench and sees an enemy aiming a gun at him. However, he pulls the trigger first and hits his target. However, the foe is not killed but badly wounded and now the soldier hears him moving in his trench, moaning and murmuring something in a foreign language.

The soldier then waits for night to fall and crawls towards his badly-injured foe. He takes out his first aid bag, dresses the wound and crawls back to his trench, numbed by fear of being executed for this "act of betrayal".

What would an AI solution be in such a situation? Is the man an enemy? By all the input parameters, he is – the classification AI algorithm would tell this soldier. And what do you do with an enemy? Finish him off.

If the soldier bases his decision solely on AI, he would never feel the unexplained urge to crawl over to his wounded opponent – even under the fear of death – and help him out of empathy, compassion or simple being human.

The AI "brain" might be super-efficient at dividing, sorting, and clustering us into groups. However, only the human soul can see any invisible universal ties connecting us, despite all differences.

This innate humane instinct is not intelligence – it is the will of God. And now imagine if this humane instinct is turned off or overridden by a sophisticated AI machine-brain interface? If this is done on a massive scale, we have a situation unimaginable even to George Orwell.

Should we then race to use IR4.0 or even IR5.0 tools to augment humans? Or should we recalibrate its utility, draw a clear line and focus on understanding and restoring all the natural processes within our bodies, societal systems and natural habitats?

Should we not focus on restoring the importance of every individual on a micro level (and the nation on the macro level) rather than open the door for an unprecedented level of control and manipulation of human nature?

We will have the power to choose the course of IR5.0 ourselves as a sovereign nation – but only if we get IR4.0 right in the first place.

All in all, the conceptualisation of IR5.0, as proposed by some influential ideologists and technocrats, , raises more questions than providing definite answers. But sometimes, a properly formulated question can be more correct than the answer itself.

Dr Rais Hussin and Dr Margarita Peredaryenko are part of Emir Research, an independent think tank focused on strategic policy recommendations based on rigorous research.