When it comes to the topic of artificial intelligence, it seems that everyone has an opinion. People agree that AI is going to make massive changes in our lives. What they disagree on, however, is whether these will be good or bad changes.
In this post, we’ll see if we can figure out which of the two opposing camps is right. Is AI going to save the world or ruin it?
It’s A Brand New Tech
Some 60 years ago, we didn’t have virtual assistants, smartphones, and so on. But don’t get fooled into thinking that artificial intelligence is a thoroughly modern concept. According to research by the TechJury team, AI was a concept that dates back a lot longer than you might think. How do they know that? The Turing Test is one that measures a computer’s responses and sees how close it is to what a real person would say. If the computer can pass the test, it should be able to pass for human.
According to the infographic that TechJury allowed us to use, in 2014, the first chatbot managed to beat the Turing Test. Quite a feat since the test was first created in the 40s. It took more than 70 years to get this right.
Back to our point – the concept is old, but we’ve only recently been able to produce the tech to back it up. Things look very different now – the tech has finally started catching up, and we have various avenues open to us now. We’ve even got big corporates falling all over each other to provide users with the tools they need to help their own programs to learn.
The First Nail in the Coffin
Now that the tech is catching up, there are those going into panic mode. They’re warning all and sundry about the potential dangers of using AI. Their warnings of, “The computers are coming,” however, tend to fall on deaf ears. The reason? The computers are not coming; they’re already here. Think about every single task that you perform daily. How much of your work is reliant on you using a computer? How many times do you need to search online for information?
The fact is that we’re already using computers and that it would be difficult to go back to a world where we had to rely on faxes or snail mail again. Besides which, if you have a smartphone, you’re already using AI. Those virtual assistants that can be so helpful are nothing more than lines of code.
AI Itself is Neutral
Something else that we’d like to raise here is that AI is neutral. It isn’t good or bad. It doesn’t love or hate as we do. So perhaps all those fears about how computers will destroy mankind are pushing things a little too far.
Think of this way. AI is capable of thinking but not feeling. That means that motives like jealousy, ambition, moral superiority, and so on are not going to form part of its makeup. Sure, we could end up in a position where a robot decides that wiping mankind out is the best option for the world.
The difference, though, is that this will be no more than a clearly calculated decision. It won’t be made out of fear of what we can do or hatred for humans. In fact, considering some of the human political players in the world today, it’s probably not the AI revolution that we need to be worried about.
