Is There A Valid Reason To Fear Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial

Intelligence or A.I. is fast becoming a part of our lives—with everything from chatbots inside apps to voice assistants competently taking over menial tasks that humans are often not very good at.

- Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

A.I. pertains to machines or computers serving as agents with cognitive functions, meaning that they are capable of reacting to specific situations or answering queries by drilling down a logic tree. If A.I. bots or agents were coded by hand, they’d be pretty basic and quite limited. What’s making A.I. extremely powerful today is machine learning and cloud computing.

Machine learning is exponential

With machine learning, an agent can be fed terabytes of data at a time and it then digests this data into functioning solutions or courses of action. This goes way beyond your basic Siri search query and into the realm of problem solving and learning. How insanely powerful is A.I. today? Here’s a recent example:

Google’s AlphaGo AI player handily beat Ke Jie, the best human Go player. According to Jie, AlphaGo’s performance left him “shocked” and “deeply impressed,” noting that the moves the computer played “would never happen in a human-to-human match.”