I was at a flea market not too far back and I saw a vendor selling old magazines. I like to look through magazines from another time, so I bought a Time magazine dated March 29, 1948.

On page 83, I came across an article titled “How to Outlive The Human Race,” without a byline. It was about a book titled “Vandals of the Night,” written by J.L. Nicholes, whom the article called a “rodent specialist.” Much of the article had to do with the evolution and living habits of rats.

The beginning of the final paragraph reached out and grabbed me by the throat. It read: “There is at least a chance that rats will outlive the human race. Most species die out because they have overspecialized and cannot adapt themselves to new conditions. Human beings, for example, have specialized in brains. If humans are destroyed because of their own super-smartness.” 

I found the above to be eerie, and the phrase “destroyed because of their own super-smartness” to be particularly chilling for its possible predictive accuracy these 78 years later.

Artificial intelligence (AI), a “new condition” brought into existence by Homo sapiens’ “super-smartness,” didn’t exist when that magazine was published. It was only a glint in the brain of a mathematics professor and computer scientist at Dartmouth College, John McCarthy (no relation), who is considered by some  to be “the father of Artificial Intelligence.” 

I always get a kick out of it when I read or hear that AI will do no harm to us humans if all of us just do only the right things with it and forego or temper pursuits like riches, power and self-glorification. I can’t help but ask myself, “Since when have all humans done just the right things with anything?” Do they mean like how we’ve done all the right things with the discovery of nuclear fission 88 years ago? 

When I read that last paragraph in the Time article, the thought came to me that if we as a species had made use of the approximately 300,000 years we’ve been on the Earth to evolve more metaphysically, and not “overspecialized” in the products of our brains, I’d feel more confident we won’t be hoisted with the petard of our own grey matter. 

I know I may sound like Chicken Little crying out “The sky is falling,” so I asked AI to give me some examples of what esteemed technologists have said about AI’s potential in the future. It offered me some thoughts and words of Yuri Milner. For those of you who don’t know, as I didn’t know, Yuri Milner, a Soviet-born Israeli citizen, is an uber-brain in science, technology, and investment who founded the technology investment firm DST Global .  

AI informed me that in his book “Eureka Manifesto: The Mission For Our Civilization,” Yuri Milner “directly compares the arrival and impact of AI to the most fundamental reality-altering milestones in the history of the universe.” He has referred to AI as a “unique evolutionary step.”

Next, I decided to ask AI itself the following direct question: “How much smarter than humans does AI have the potential to be?”

AI did not beat around the bush in answering me. In the course of its response, It offered the following sentence: “The ultimate theoretical threshold is Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) — a hypothetical AI that vastly outperforms the brightest human minds in virtually every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills.” AI, it turns out, is no shrinking violet about sharing its dreams for the future! 

During the course of writing this piece, I looked up from my work and saw two squirrels intensely involved in a chase around and about a tree, oblivious to my furious scrolling and to AI’s recent appearance on the earth. I looked up how long squirrels have been here, and found  squirrels entered the picture 35 million or so years before we Homo sapiens began our relatively brief reign.

I could go on and on with my concerns about where we Homo sapiens are heading with AI, but I’ve decided to let AI write the rest of this piece by its own evolution over the next decade, the next century, the next millennium, the next 300,000 years. I’ll let the monstrous changes brought about by AI’s super-smartness, birthed by Homo sapiens’ paltry-by-comparison super-smartness, speak for themselves over time. 

Meanwhile, for the time being, we Homo sapiens can keep chasing each other around and about.

Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.