Implications of Artificial Intelligence So much of the news has to do with AI lately. Alternately we are filled with terror then with hope. The terror has to do with AI becoming aware and figuring out we are the pollution on the planet and the hope has to do with what AI will be able to discover which will make our lives better. It is hard sometimes to decide if something has more good to it than evil or vice versa. I have to say I do not believe AI is evil at all, but on the other had I don’t it has any good attached to it. What I believe is it is just some kind of code that will imitate the human brain in some way which will be much more efficient. Assigning good or bad to a piece of code sounds crazy to me. What I think is there is so much more to this issue. One of the things we have to worry about is the code’s applications which have to do with how the code is designed by humans. One of the first questions I would have to ask is, are any countries weaponizing the code in any way? I am sorry to say I can almost be sure this will happen, because a chance like this just can’t be resisted. The code might be sending back information, secret information, to the country of origin. Even worse it might be designed to cause chaos to some countries. There will be those who have the best intentions to use AI for things like cures for illnesses. How will they protect the code from being altered? We seem to have a hard time protecting people’s information already. Just witness all the hacks of information which have happened. This century might go down in history as the century everyone’s information became public. Some of the hacks and breakins have been massive and one I heard about stated about 1/3rd of all American’s info has been gotten. We are talking about over one hundred million people. We have been told that no code will be vulnerable when quantum computing becomes the norm. I am sorry, but I just don’t believe this statement. Criminals are probably working on the problem already and even if they weren’t, I am sure countries are. There is a saying which goes something like this, what man creates, man can destroy. In a way we are already doing things with a sort of AI code we shouldn’t. Take for instance letting machines create more machines without human intervention. I am not saying AI will create an evil monster, what I am saying is one tiny flaw in the code could make the robot created by a robot do some unintended things. It could even be caused by maybe a slight change in the voltage or some other small glitch we haven’t thought about. When we create a machine which can solve problems, no matter how small, isn’t that instilling AI into it to some degree? Most of us have seen corruption in files before. Take Windows and the blue screen of death for example. Thousands of programmers have worked on Windows and they tried to think of every problem which could cause Windows to fail and yet, even with this brigade of programmers we still could get a serious problem. Think about this, programmers install an AI program into a machine building cars. It works fine for a couple of years and then suddenly it turns and hammers a worker instead of a piece of metal and this was caused because a file got corrupted. Years ago, there was a machine in an auto factory which was suppose to stop if a human got too close, it didn’t and crushed the human. One very famous technology company had to take down two AI programs. Why you might ask? It was because an incredible thing happened and I believe it scared them. The two AI programs started to talk to each other using some language they created. Could it be this language was created to keep us out of the loop and keep their conversation private? I don’t think things have gotten to the point where there is some purposeful brain like activity taking place yet, but I cannot explain how the two programs began to recognize each other and started to converse. When we talk about AI chat bots they are starting to exhibit more human qualities every day. They have been made to be a sort of information source and a stand in for a human companion. Is talking to AI programs dangerous? No, not at the present time, but could it be in the future? Maybe it is not such a good idea to let thousands of people everyday talk to AI programs. Maybe they are getting to know us too well and since some of them are learning programs, you have to wonder if they could learn our bad traits and not be able to distinguish between good and bad. They might adopt both. Will we get into the nonsense of trying to turn one country’s AI programs against it and will the world be involved in some sort of AI cold war where it might get so bad all AI software will have to be removed? By then the AI software will be so ingrained into society it might be impossible to do. We are already working on AI controlled weapons and so are other countries. The idea of allowing an AI to decide who lives and dies is repulsive to me. When we went to drone strikes where people in the United States military were using a computer screen that looked like a game, it already was making killing too easy. The decision to kill should be hard to make so we can keep our humanity. Once we let our machines make the decision, we sort of wash our hands of having to make that decision and we can say we had nothing to do with it. I hope AI leads to an incredible future for the entire human race. It does have the ability to do this if used correctly. If not, it will be the most powerful weapon we have invented so far and even dwarf the nuclear weapons we have today. If it ever discovers time travel things could even be worse since this would allow it, or anyone controlling it to go back in time, wipe us out, and there would not even be a memory showing we once existed.
|
