Accepting AI

Come to grips with the future...

- Sahil Dawka

There’s a lot of fear-mongering about Artificial Intelligence and the very future of the human race. Heck, there will be some of it in the articles that follow, and for all we know, they might eventually prove to be well-founded fears. However, this article looks at the flip side, and plays devil’s advocate. Why? Because that’s how you arrive at truths, by looking at all the evidence, especially the evidence that goes against the premise that “AI is bad for humanity”.

JUST A TOOL

Maybe a machine consciousness will someday take offense at this paragraph, but AI is still essentially a productivity tool. It is merely lines of code, written out by humans to enhance the abilities of machines to excel in areas that humans don’t. When we think AI we usually think of Skynet, the evil intelligence of the Terminator series, or else the AI of the Matrix world. Even if you think of AI as the characters from the movies A.I. or Bicentennial Man, you’re essentially feeding your own narcissism by assuming machines want to be human, when there’s no proof that machines even “want” anything.

AI today is so much more than the limited human-killer of fiction, or a poor little machine trying to be a human. AI is used for machine learning, perception, natural language processing, planning, social intelligence, manufacturing, etc. AI is such a broad term, that there’s no one discipline that covers it. It is each of the aforementioned fields of study, and all of them as well. AI, as we know it today, is essentially trying to replicate the functions of an intelligence – us.