Artificial Intelligence: A double edged weapon

Artificial intelligence, generally known as AI, is the simulation of human intelligence by a machine. In the last decade, the technological advancements allowed this field to flourish. It achieved what was, until very recently, a science-fiction movies material.

But (yeah, there’ll always be a but), what do we, humans, want to achieve ? Until when will we keep investing in the artificial intelligence field?

How far have we got?

Compared to our starting point, we’ve gone quite far actually.

Now We talk about self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles capable of analyzing their environment, taking complex decisions and acting in no time.

Also, we have chatbots. They can communicate, take orders and resolve issues without you noticing that it’s a bot.

But (I know, another but) until know, we have only mastered what’s called ‘Narrow AI’. It means developing artificial intelligence with a narrow activity field. More like a mono-purpose AI.

The most advanced AIs existing nowadays, take IBM’s Watson as an example, are astonishing and can perform some really complex tasks. But they only excel in one specific competence sphere, mastering it by absorbing a huge amount of data related to it. That limitation gave birth to the subclasses of AIs: driving-oriented, medical-oriented, etc.

We are proud of that, since even us, humans, are not experts in all fields. Since our early years of studies, we choose which path to follow. It keeps getting narrower as we pick out “specialties” and become “experts” on one specific field.

That said, we don’t have the rights to be mad at AIs, and we can proudly say that we created an imitation of our own knowledge hunt.

But (now I’m abusing), humans aren’t looking for just imitating themselves. They want better, smarter and quicker than us. That’s why we started talking about ‘General AI’, a concept that defies ‘Narrow AI’.

An Artificial Generic Intelligence has a human-like mind. Its thinking capabilities are not related to a specific subject. Just like a human being, if it doesn’t know an answer, it’ll think about it, learn it then add it to its knowledge base.

When we’ll start harvesting General AI’s fruits, we will no longer talk about goal-oriented Artificial Intelligence, but simply ‘Intelligence’.

In a more humanly way, machines will be able to follow different learning paths simultaneously, bypassing humans need to guide them towards what to learn or how to do it.

Does it look good down the road?

Well, in my humble opinion, the greatest gift the humankind has is its brain.

It’s what distinguishes us from the rest of the world, what made us build civilizations and fought “each other” to do so, what made us be aware of our rights and claim them and what made us tame nature and make it obey our commands.

Now we’re trying to give the exact same thing to machines. So why do we believe that they won’t follow the same path?

If a machine gains awareness, starts to “think” and develop consciousness, the first thing it would do is ask for its rights, then more.

There will be machine civilizations and machine wars. Machines will race us to the natural resources, that can barely cover our needs, and will harvest them better than us.

Stephen Hawking, the great physicist, had once said: A.I. could be ‘worst event in the history of our civilization’, inviting all researchers to employ best practices and effective management. Elon Musk, the contemporary genius, have raised awareness about the same subject.

Conclusion

Artificial Intelligence had made life very much easier for humans. It’s always great to have that inexhaustible help, always there to take care of you and fulfilling your endless requests.

We just need to be careful while taking the path towards a full-autonomous, conscious, AI, because things can get out of our hands and get far away from our reach.