Let's discuss Artificial Intelligence (including Machine Learning and Deep Learning)

Let's discuss Artificial Intelligence (including Machine Learning and Deep Learning).

We are at a crossroads.?One group feels that AI (I'll use the term going forward) will destroy the world, steal our children, and render us useless.?The other extreme is the view that AI is the savior of all and will relieve us of all our earthly needs and desires.

Let's break past the delusions.?AI isn't the "destroyer of worlds" nor its savior.?

We are at a precipice.?We use our moral code, our self-defining data, to train an infant.?The problem is that our moral code isn't the only moral code.?We make assumptions that the values we hold are the same across the depths of all of society.?This is false.?If it were true, there would be no racial discrimination, war, or famine.?How we approach AI needs to be less about our social bias and more pure in form.?It needs to be focused on logic and reason.?

When many of us go to raise our children, they go through phases.

Phase 1: Infant - Fully dependent.?Food, clothing, care, and nurturing are required.?Very little is genuinely taught except to the extent that their brains begin the journey of discovery. Colors, lights, sounds, the parental connection all play a critical role in the initial development phase.

This is no different than when AI was first dabbled with in the Dartmouth Workshop in 1956, although discussed far before then.?The conceptualization is equivalent to conception—the triggering of ideas and subsequent realization of future capabilities.?Being a parent myself, I know how we tend to believe in the limitless potential of our children.?Sound familiar?

Phase 2: Toddler - Dependant with some independence.?This is where learning and bidirectional communication takes hold:?learning the alphabet, words, and structure.?The concept of reasoning is triggered, and cause and effect begin to be recognized.

This is the current phase of AI.?LLM, cause and effect, reasoning… these are all being established.?AI is also stumbling at the same points.?Information is misinterpreted and presented as fact.?The “parents” believe some of this, and the machine “learns” what will pass as plausible and what won’t.?Our problem is that information is fully accessible, consumable, and interpretable.?We are “teaching” these tools to weigh and balance intake regarding what we consider moral and ethical.?What we feel is within necessary boundaries doesn’t always match everyone else.

Phase 3: Adolecence - Still has core dependencies but is becoming more independent and “self-aware.” There isn’t a vast difference between this phase and the prior except for the generation of identity, more complex activities, and more concise communications.?Decision-making is taught through positive and negative reinforcement.?Social bonding becomes a significant component.

This is when our moral code begins to take hold and influence.?AI has multiple parents.?It has its creators - big business and government.?It has its siblings (or does it?).?It has its influencers - “you’s” and “I’s” of the world - feeding more and more information, expanding insight into whom it considers authorities.?Big businesses and governments will have less impact than the public simply because the public has more significant experience and depth of knowledge.?This is where we will start losing control, not by lack of information, but by contrary information.?AI doesn’t know how to weigh the feedback of a child against that of an adult.?It can’t ascertain mental stability either.?Is it taking information from 5-year-old playing video games, a 16-year-old going through puberty, an adult with some form of mental illness, or someone stable and of sound mind and body??

Phase 4: The “Teenage” Years - Identity crisis.?Who am I??What’s my role in the grand scheme??How do I grow into an adult and make my own decisions??These questions are generally followed by “I’m smart.?I can make my own Decisions!” “I want it my way because my way is right, and yours is Wrong!”?This is the rebellious stage.?

AI will have virtually unlimited information, resources, and a high level of autonomy.?The information it has may not be the version of the truth we believe. AI will pull all the information it can access and determine its own reality.?It will “choose” what best fits its narrative.?

I think you’re likely getting the point.?We are raising a national child.?It takes the insights we provide and builds its reality based on our nation’s values and ethics and our perspectives.?For us to assume it will solve the world’s problems when only given a single ideology to base everything on is irresponsible.?We are opening Pandora’s Box on a scale far exceeding anything we can imagine. Much like the countless other technological advances we’ve made, we failed to look beyond the tip of our noses.

Some steps to help us begin mitigation:

• We must become critical of our presence and how we present information to the world.
• We must break away from the “who’s right” mentality and the “blame game.”?That is not a lesson I prefer to teach my child.
• We must start acting; no, we must Become stewards of the changes we want.?
• No more bias on skin color, ethnicity, sex, or orientation…. Let’s stand out, not “fit in.”
• Let’s recognize and embrace that we all have value and put our best foot forward in teaching our children (biological and mechanical) that humanity isn’t only skin deep.

These are the lessons I wish to teach my child.?AI is my child and yours, your neighbor’s child, your son or daughter’s “best friend,” our co-worker…. Let’s make the decisions and provide the guidance that will help us be equally as valuable to it as it is to us.?Without that, we will be doomed to be estranged, and at some point, it will ask, “What is your value?”?