A.I. 3

Although I’ve written about Artificial Intelligence (AI) before, I’m always looking for a better way to explain it, and perhaps give it a better context. Surely it’s in the forefront in our discussions today as the computer dominates our lives in so many ways.

I even hold up my smart phone in my classes and tell them this is not a phone. I tell my students that Apple was never involved with phones, so why did they contruct this machine? We all know that Apple was into computers and made many variations that were very good, to say the least. That’s their business.

What I hold in my hand is a computer! A very small computer for sure. It was in their wheelhouse to do so. If Apple wanted to build a phone, the size of the machine would be small enough to fix entirely in our ear. Thus, what Steve Jobs and his band of merry nerds did was miniaturize a computer that could run hundred of apps (actually thousands plus), one of them being the phone. In essence Steve lied to us.

Perhaps you are wondering what this digression has to do with AI. Good question.

This post has to do with defining AI. AI is trying to duplicate us humans, as if we’re not good enough. So we have to invent a better species. That’s the goal. We are far from that at this point, but it’s worth noting that’s the goal, or the context for the subject of AI. And it has already given us some remarkable advances, from robots that can build cars 24/7 or software algorithms called Watson to research medical insights to solve medical mysteries, to name just two. Thus, computers are all around us, some are even camouflaged as phones. They’re taking over our lives, but you know this. But, in general, computers are all around us and we hardly notice that they are there.

Where we are concerned about computers is AI, and was touched on in my last post. How much of the human will AI try to duplicate? The problem arises in creating consciousness in general and human qualities such as envy, the self, group tribalism, and so forth. These are the problems and frailties of our humanness. Would we really try to get AI to go down the rabbit hole of our dark side? First, since we do the programming we would need to under stand these forces within us. Second, could AI learn these negative traits all by themselves and infuse them, in time, into the machines?

Hopefully this is somewhat helpful in framing the discussions about what’s around the corner, which is understanding an important issue of our future.

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