AI might be a human-destroying killer,
but without any AI,
the world wouldn’t be a very awesome place.
Stephen Hawking famously said to the BBC,
“The development of full artificial intelligence could
spell the end of the human race.”
Elon Musk has said it’s like “summoning a demon.”
And yet, earlier this month, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking
and important minds from around the world signed
an open letter from the Future of Life Institute,
encouraging the future of this technology.
The letter was widely interpreted by the media,
indicating these super-smart peeps are
saying “AI is going to kill us all,”
but that’s not actually entirely accurate.
It says right in the open letter,
“The potential benefits are huge,
since everything that civilization has to offer is
a product of human intelligence.”
What they are saying is how AI might change the way we live,
work, and affect the planet.
AI could solve problems in ways we can’t conceive,
and if done right, might create a better safer world for us
in the process!
At the moment, AI isn’t dangerous in itself
unless you’re living in the realms of film
and science fiction and television.
As of now, the most advanced artificial intelligences
are still pretty basic,
working in areas like language processing,
photo and face recognition, shipping and logistics,
or even in driverless cars.
To say these are “intelligent” though,
does not sound really right.
Though often AI do have some machine learning,
computers only know what we teach them.
For example, the brain of a driverless car.
While pretty smart, you can take it to the store,
but it can’t shop for groceries once you were there:
the variables are completely different.
As of 2013, the most advanced AI in the world,
according to Business Insider, was ConceptNet 4.
It was built by MIT and had the intelligence of a preschooler.
It could explore a bit on its own,
but mostly needed humans in putting information
for it to learn, mainly by keyboard.
They’re going up now to ConceptNet 5.3, a free download!
So can’t be that dangerous, right?
Sure, a full AI might be bad, but these rudimentary AI
are nothing but helpful and should continue to be so!
They said that right in the letter.
Stephen Hawking himself uses a computer with type of AI to
speak to us all.
It’s called Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT).
It uses his previous writings and communication to predict
what he’s going to want to say.
That doesn’t really sound too dangerous,
if you think about it.
And without all the AI being able to learn,
that wouldn’t be much help at all.
Hawking couldn’t even TELL us to watch for AI
without using AI!
Hawking, Musk, and researchers from the largest
and smartest tech firms around the world,
not to mention universities and other groups,
are not saying, “Run for your lives!”
They’re saying, “Run the right algorithms!”
What do you think about Artificial Intelligence though?