Artificial Intelligence: A Boon or a Curse By Katherine Lightwood

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Artificial Intelligence: A Boon or a Curse 

By Katherine Lightwood 



As Hanson Robotics launched a socially interactive robot 'Sophia', since then I have been obsessively watching videos of her on YouTube. I get amazed by her witty answers and expressive smile. How can anyone build such a complex artificial intelligence!

AI are not big scary robots that sci-fi movies imply, but it is real and powerful. And day by day it is becoming so intelligent that it will eventually help us to solve little problems like having to do things we don't enjoy or keeping us entertained. But some naysayers are definitely saying these things will get worse, but like always I ignored (you know 'Humans', conformation bias is in our genes) until I put on my attention glasses and saw who those naysayers were.

 Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk. World's smartest, richest and coolest humans (that's what I think).

Well! to know more about them you better google it, because whatever I would say would be less. So, I took the measurable top three field of human success to make myself feel that AI might be dangerous to slightly push my cognitive bias to think 'maybe it's worth doing some research'. And this leads me to know more about the amazing things AI could do these days, which got me thinking how quickly AI is advancing and it's getting better than all of us in lots of different things.

Recently, I came across a TED talk by a lady who talked about 'teaching computers to understand pictures'. She described that the process is usually similar to the way we teach stuff to toddlers. By providing the information again and again so that they memorize it and it gets stored in their memory. And I get to know that computers also do the same thing. But the main difference is that at some point in the learning graph, AI gets inhumanely fast with it's learning capabilities.

So, in order to know the imminent threat of AI, let me explain you the 'law of exceeding returns' (although I completely made that up).
    Imagine a guy from 1970 met a guy of 2000. He would be amazed to see a simple mobile phone he is using and Fax machines he uses to send his documents and might even get blown away by the increasing usage of the internet. And if that guy from 2000 met a guy from 2017, he would be mind blown by today's advancement of sleek laptops, phones and google glasses and other tech things which I am sure you all are familiar with. 
Now, did you see my point? It took 30 years to amaze a guy from 1970, imagine how would he feel if he meets the guy from 2017. When there is the only difference is of 17 years, and this graph is spiking up and up without stopping or lagging at all.

And I am not talking about small innovations here, I am talking about technologies that have fundamentally changed the way the world works. Look at how much the world relies on the internet than 15 years ago.
Problem with us is that we tend to think linearly. But technological innovation is not linear, it's getting faster and faster. So, to our linear minds, our next 100 years would be like 20,000 years of today's rate.
Just to clarify, it's not like any real law of physics or anything. It's more like Sod's law (if anything happens in the past it will happen in the future too). But, this rate has been very consistent historically.
Currently, our society is filled with AI and NO it's not any Illuminati conspiracy (they are not sentient and hide among us).

Experts have divided AI into three broad categories:

ANI - Artificial Narrow Intelligence.
          It's all over the place. e.g Google Maps.

 AGI - Artificial General Intelligence.
          This could be a computer that is as smart as a human mind. Like anything you can do with a                brain e.g making a successful business or playing a video game, you can do this with AGI.

ASI - Artificial Super Intelligence.
         When a computer is better than human (more creative and socially adept). And the range could be a little bit better to better than all the humanity combined.

Well!! till now this category is mostly theoretical, not much has been done in this field.

To convert an ANI to AGI, it is taking a lot of time. But going from AGI to ASI, it will take less time because unlike humans AGI can rewire it's own brain to improve itself.

Although we humans could improve ourselves in many ways we can't physically move our brain around to change how efficient we are at learning and AI will able to do that. If it notices that its brain or operating system needs to be improved then it can improve itself.

It is literally, impossible for a human brain to comprehend how an artificial intelligence 'think' by definition. And when I say 'think' I mean the way it processes information.
The only method of doing this safely that I can think is growing an AI around an existing human brain.

Well! I am very excited to say that there is actually some progress in that area, and that is called a 'Neural Lace'. It is actually a plastic net which is injected into the brain of mice and scientists have actually managed to stimulate the individual neurons.

But, even if we grow a super intelligent side of the human brain, the future of humanity will depend only on that particular human and how their morality and priority will evolve as they arrange their brain.
At the end of the day it got me thinking, where will this cosmic advancement lead us. Even after coding an AI with perfect 'moral values' to do everything that is 'right'. There will always be some people who will disagree with all these. Because there is no ultimate definition of 'right'. Whoever will control the first superintelligent AI will be designated as God. And it will create more harm than good. So, my friends let's slow down a bit and see what we are heading towards. 

Seems like it's time for me to sign out. If you like to see other posts like this make sure to visit our page Crimson Creed. You can also follow us on Facebook.

Katherine Lightwood    

Comments

  1. Praveen Pal19 December 2017 at 12:17

    AI is next revolution in the whole world...
    AI is door to Future Technology...
    Nice topic Katherine...
    all the best

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Katherine Lightwood19 December 2017 at 12:47

      Hey!! Thanks buddy...I am glad that you liked it..!!

      Delete

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