Will Artificial Intelligence Take Care of Us or Destroy Us?

From SIRI to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly. While science fiction often portrays AI as robots with human-like characteristics, AI can encompass anything from Google’s search algorithms to IBM’s Watson to autonomous weapons.

Artificial intelligence today is properly known as narrow AI (or weak AI), in that it is designed to perform a narrow task (e.g. only facial recognition or only internet searches or only driving a car). However, the long-term goal of many researchers is to create general AI (AGI or strong AI). While narrow AI may outperform humans at whatever its specific task is, like playing chess or solving equations, AGI would outperform humans at nearly every cognitive task.

Today, the most popular A.I. techniques are machine learning and its younger cousin, deep learning. Unlike computer programs that rigidly follow rules written by humans, both machine learning and deep learning algorithms can look at a dataset, learn from it, and make new predictions. Deep learning in particular can make impressive predictions by discovering data patterns that people might miss.

People say these machines will be benevolent. They will be perfect. They will truly be these beautiful, benevolent, creatures. I don't think that is accurate and I don't think that they are going to be terminating, baby-eating machines either. These machines are going to reflect our species and our evolutionary process. Everything we are will end up in these artificially intelligent machines no matter what we do.

It's such a complex and such new technology in a lot of ways. I think we are afraid of ourselves. That is what it is. We are afraid of ourselves and our own unconscious minds. When we are building something that reflects us, it's the one thing we're all afraid to face. We're afraid to face ourselves. Building machines that mirror our consciousness is a very frightening proposition because we have seen how evil people can be.

What we are really talking about here is an artificially intelligent machine that is going to be able to surpass our intelligence level. At a certain point, you can call it a singularity. There will be a certain point where these machines have super-human intelligence. The best-case scenario is that they will be caretakers and they will be our teachers. They will teach us to be a better species. That is what I am hoping for as a techno-optimist.

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