Artificial Intelligence: A tool or a threat?
Alegendry Physicist, Stephen Hawking, once said “I visualise a time when we will be to robots, what dogs are to humans and I am rooting for the machines” . Not only him but Bill Gates, Elon Musk and many others have shown their concerns over the advancement of artificial intelligence but wait a minute why are they concerned? Today AI has led us to a world of efficient medical diagnosis, advanced security systems, advanced internet surfing and much more. Let me tell you that today we are using AI for small tasks in many fields called applied AI but the real concern is about general AI, in which systems can handle any task that intellegent humans can perform and most likely beat us at each of them.
The first and foremost effect of using general AI is the rise in unemployment and increasing social inequality, causing social distress as machines replaces humans at workplace.
Another risk is that it is making weapons autonomous. Thing to concern is not that they might gain mind of their own but about the dangers they will be having with indivivuals or organizations that doesn’t value human life.
AI can also be used for political propoganda as in 2016 US presidental elections, a company called Cambridge Analytica collected data of 50 million facebook users and through AI used it for its own means in the election campign.
Part of what humans value in AI powered machines is their efficiency but if our commands are not clear, they can cause danger to the society.As in case of self driving cars , for example if we command them to reach to hospital as soon as possible without mentioning that to follow traffic rules , so in that case we will probably reach to the hospital, not in that car but in ambulance as these machines always get literal meaning.
Here I want to ask you some questions….How can we build AI machines that will refuse an illegal or unethical command….How can we build AI that we can trust…How can AI be designed to recognize and resist hacking, abuse or malware that aims to weaponize AI aganist vital human interest…. How can we ensure that the economic benifits of AI are justly distributed rather than growing political and economic risks of extreme inequality…..Should any artificial agent occupy a position of responsibilty…What would that mean..Can machines be held responsible for the actions they take without human directions and can a machine ever understand and accept risk.
These and many other questions in my mind, continue to make me feel that “Artificial intellegence is a threat to humans” but what do you think about that?
