Afraid of AI? – Here is why I am not!
When in Odyssey 2001, Hal, the AI crew member, put the mission at higher priority than the well-being of the crew, I was shocked. Skynet of The Terminator movies is an equally undesirable form of artificial intelligence (AI), which came to the conclusion that mankind is on its way to self- annihilation and needed to be stopped and there are countless other movies that paint a likewise grim picture of AI and its consequences.
But we humans have a history of being very suspicious about new technologies. When trains and cars first came about, there were many doctors and scientists concerned about the consequences of the high velocities and predicted that we would die a very young age if we would accelerate to speeds over 50 km/h. Telephones were supposed to damage our brains and TV sets would grill us. Our skepticism towards new technologies is huge. Computers would take all jobs away, Mobile phones grill your brain and Wi-Fi is likewise bad. The Y2K bug would take all planes down and similar to the Computer scare form the 70th, it is now the robots that will take all jobs away.
In reality not much of that has happened. In fact, we are now looking for more computer and software engineers than ever before and robotics and AI will do the same, it will create countless new opportunities and jobs.
Whilst I truly believe that we will one day create a super-intelligent computer, I don’t agree to the doomsday scenarios that are being painted by some.
Currently AI is making great progress on all fronts. From image and voice recognition to learning how to be really good at playing super-complex games, or to make sense out of huge amounts of data.
Already today, I do enjoy that images services can make sense of the images I am uploading and make searching for them a whole new experience. Gone are the days in which you had to tag every single image. I also enjoy voice controlling my devices and Google Now, Siri and Cortana from time to time even leave me amazed how this interaction improves by the month.
Watson’s appearance on Jeopardy was great and so was Google’s Ai when it defeated Lee Sedol, one of the world’s top Go players, something what was thought to be impossible till then.
Consequently, if we believe that intelligence is mostly based on cognitive information processing and that we will continue to research, we will ultimately create that super-intelligent machine, processing information at the speed of light, where our biological circuits only work at a fraction of that speed.
If we teach that super-intelligence our values, especially including our ethical values and have good regulatory and security measures in place, we have huge opportunities in front of us. From curing diseases and designing new engines to generally solving emerging challenges faster are big hopes I am having for that future, which like so often is only about to start and I am happy to part of it.