The past few months have been a roller coaster ride for the field of Artificial Intelligence. The field that aims to marginally replicate human intelligence, has met the critical eye of many experts in the field of technology. With the likes of Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg making statements about the inception of artificial intelligence in real life and its far fetched visions, the subject has to be a talk of the technology world. A few incidences in the research work carried out in various organizations like Facebook have also added to the ripples to the already unstable discussions of AI.
All these discussions have created a confusion in the minds of a few common people, about the field in general. These are the people who will be directly affected , if AI surfaces out in real life. As an enthusiast in the field, I felt the need to express my thoughts on the entire discussion. The ideas mentioned below are correct to my knowledge. In case of any discrepancy please feel free to correct me in the comments section. SO lets set out on the exploration of the complete AI conundrum.
The sudden rise in Artificial Intelligence, in the past few years has taken many people by surprise. While some , who benefit from the technology , have praised AI , but some people feel that AI has the ability to throw them of their livelihoods. The reasons of the fear sound justifiable to a certain extend. Some of the reasons are:-
- AI would cause large scale unemployment.
It is true that if AI reached a level it promises to be in a few years, humanity will see a large scale loss of jobs. Machines working instead of humans assures better throughput and better efficiency. So whenever AI sets its foot in business world in a true sense, unskilled labor or semi - skilled labor (no idea if such a definition even exists) will suffer a lot of from unemployment. With the advent of self -driving cars, drivers will lose their jobs. With a machine giving better results, a bricklayer’s job may also be threatened. An accountant or a secretary may face expulsion , with a program taking their place. With all this being said , we have a lot to deal with in this serious issue.
Not sure a bricklayer and account would be good examples here since those jobs seem to be mainly mechanical, easily replaced by computers without even much advancement in A.I. I'd say more specialized fields like data analysis and medical diagnosis might be under threat by advancements in machine intelligence.
But if we think about it, for every piece of development that made us reach the era of Computers today, we have faced this issue multiple times. Starting right from the nomadic human beings , who used to hunt for a living. Agriculture took away their value(commercial terms can't be used , as no commerce existed then) from the society. The very well known Industrial Revolution, saw automation of numerous industries leading to loss of jobs. But the notable feature of this trend is that, it created more jobs in the long run than it used up.
AI is a similar piece of technology, will give more than it takes. Imagine some horizons that we didn’t explore due to limitations of human brain. A process that we cannot perform now due to limit in computation power or human thinking capacity, will be easily accessible now. This may open up completely unexplored fields of science. A calculator made counting in crores and more easier thus facilitating large scale business, AI will explore uncharted territories of science thus creating employment in completely unexplored fields.
However, the problem we face here would actually now be to raise skilled labor force. The newly opened fields will require a lot of skilled labor force, and thus would require an improvement in the standard of education
- AI is not a transparent technology
AI is well known to learn on its own , by analyzing the data it receives. We as the makers of AI know theoretically, about how the program learns by itself. But what it learns, how much it modifies itself depends entirely on the data provided. AI thus acts like a blackbox even to its makers. The makers can just analyse the output given by the blackbox and decide on the utility of the output.
I would like to refer the highly misunderstood Facebook chat bot experiment here. According to my reading, it was just a weird output that the two chat bots started to create and process. Facebook simply deleted the unwanted output. This was misinterpreted as the two chat bots developing their own language and as Facebook shutting it down. I am not a person in the industry yet, but I can assure that such incidences happen a lot in research divisions of all industries and there is nothing alarming in this event. This event highlights the black box nature of the field.
The lack of transparency , is another reason of fear in minds of all the common people. People fear that , humans may lose their control over machines and the machines may just start communicating with each other (just like the Facebook event mentioned above). But we need to realize that, when Facebook modified it’s chat bot experiment, it indicated that we as human operators have a full control of the system.
- AI can lead to mass destruction
The “self learning black box” that AI is perceived to be, is frequently feared to be a ‘human killer’. Recent developments in the field have led to robots or programs controlling weapons and ammunition for various security organizations under the government of various countries. Elon Musk and other technically tuned people have demanded ban on the ‘killer robots’ in UN.
The prospect of mass destruction using AI looks a real threat to humanity. We as a civilization have previously made many such weapons of mass destruction like nuclear weapons, bombs and many other weapons. The only reason we fear AI more than the nuclear threat, is the existence of a universal body that controls the nuclear action around the globe, or the non-existence of it for AI. Unfortunately at this moment, we have no full control over AI controlled bots.
In the end, all we can derive from the entire discussion is that, AI is a powerful technology that holds the key to the future of humanity. The glow of the power brings in the possibility of illuminating fields that were untouched by humanity. The fact that with this power we can extend the scientific reach of humanity is so overwhelming. The glare of this ‘Sun of AI‘ will also bring the shadows of problem along with it. Every technology developed by humans has a fair share of negatives. We have always found a way to keep those negatives in our control, through research, experimentation or any other scientific methods.
The world has theoretically seen the power of artificial intelligence. The strength of AI is not hidden to the world but the possibilities of AI harming the human society is also not hidden. AI in itself is not an issue, but AI in wrong hands is threat to humanity. This data driven technology, gradually grows with every single day of experimentation. The importance of research in the field of artificial intelligence has reached the peak of its significance in this age. An AI application with a negative training can only be countered by a well researched and well trained counter-application. This kind of training to any system will require large amount of time. The system grows stronger with passing year, month or even a day. The need for significant research needs to be recognized by every person in the world of technology today.
Now, returning to the debate that created some confusions in the world. People draw the conclusion of the debate, that AI is dangerous for human beings. But the entire plot of debate was to recognize the problems in AI and work on the betterment of the technology. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk both are leading brains in the technical industries. The television reports and articles on the internet, have frequently misquoted them to create an image on how they feel AI is dangerous. Through the entirety of the debate, both the parties have stressed heavily on the point that AI needs a lot of research.We see Facebook carrying out research in AI and Elon Musk investing heavily in artificial intelligence. It is thus up on all of us to understand that artificial intelligence is here to stay, we will have to put in some extra effort to conduct research in the field.