Worried that A.I. is going to take over?
That fear is so artificial.
You know, recently there've been a lot of people talking about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence in our future.
Hollywood has really run away with this concept.
Just take a look at Avengers, it all takes the form of Ultron.
- I'm Rusty Ward with Science Friction and I think it would be irresponsible if NATO allowed Jonathan to lull you all into a false sense of security about how wonderful the future is going to be with A.I.
I need all of you to burn your birth certificates right now because that is how the Sentient A.I. program SkyNet is going to know when and where to exactly send the T-800s to eliminate you from the timeline.
- Whoa.
Whoa, Rusty, wow.
Calm down, alright?
I'm here to talk about how artificial intelligence has the potential to make our lives and future amazing and to calm some of those fears.
- Very well, go on.
- Thank you.
You know, I'd hate for their to be any science friction between us.
- Oh boy.
I think that pun might've been worse than the inescapable threat of A.I.
- Yeah.
Well, at any rate, a few people have brought up some concerns about artificial intelligence in the future.
- Oh, by a few people you mean physicist Stephen Hawking, entrepreneur Elon Musk, and multi-billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates?
- Exactly.
These are smart forward thinking people, but I think it's time we have a conversation about what artificial intelligence really is.
You see, the A.I. that you and I encounter on a daily basis is what we would call weak A.I., but just because it's weak, doesn't mean it's useless.
In fact, it can do certain things way better than humans can.
Let's take mapping software with real traffic information as an example.
That could reroute your pathway around any traffic snarls and give you an efficient way to get from point A to point B.
Now the mapping software's really good at doing that but you wouldn't say it was thinking and that's the rub.
You see, a lot of these warnings are all about what we would call strong A.I.
Artificial intelligence that is capable of thinking for itself, perhaps having consciousness and making its own decisions.
We don't have any machines that could do that.
Maybe one day we'll build one, but for moment I would say all this doom and gloom is putting the cart before the horse.
Now even if we do make machines that one day can think, there's no reason to believe they're going to think the way humans do.
They may not have motivations or emotions.
I think what we're doing here is projecting ourselves onto our future robot overlords.
Wait, what?
Just a joke.
Look, artificial intelligence is a lot like a magic trick.
Once you learn how it's calculating its results, the illusion that the machine is thinking just fades away.
But weak A.I. has an amazing potential to transform our world, responding to our needs before we even have a chance to vocalize 'em.
This is the future where we're largely unaware of problems because our machines are taking care of them before they're even perceptible.
You see, the machines can't think like us, yet anyway, but they can perceive through senors and react at a fraction of the time it takes humans to react.
Let's take autonomous cars as an example.
They see the world around them using an array of senors and because of that, they don't have to pay attention to just one direction at a time, they never get distracted, and they can react in a way that makes human reactions look glacial in comparison.
Just recently there was an autonomous car that did a road trip across the entire United States from San Francisco to New York.
It did so safely, obeying all traffic laws, it never got sleepy, it never got annoyed at whatever radio station you happen to pick, and this isn't just a publicity stunt.
If you remember our conversation with Henrik Christensen, he helped draft the National Robotics Roadmap, he told us, children born today will never have to drive a car, thanks to autonomous vehicle technology, and it's important to remember that these discussions we're having today are giving us guidelines on the responsible and careful ways to design artificial intelligence so we stand to benefit, not be in danger, so I hope that makes you feel better.
- No, it doesn't.
- Alright, Rusty, I get your concerns.
I do understand them.
The unknown can be daunting, but it can also be amazing and I say we move forward not with fear but with wisdom, with caution, and together we can boldly go where...
Well, you know.
0 comments:
Post a Comment