Should we fear AI?
Have you dreamt or contemplated being assassinated by a cyborg like Arnold’s Terminator? Imagine if machines were to become intelligent and start making decisions without human intervention. Would they turn against us and conspire to extinct the human race? Well, maybe or maybe not. This is not what the article is about.
The article contemplates what differentiates Human Intelligence & Artificial intelligence. According to me, it is our ability to derive meaning based on our personality. The subjective inferences we draw are greatly influenced by our personality. Imagine you are sitting in a cafe, sipping on your favourite brew. You notice a lady crossing the street with her pet dog. PAUSE.
The thoughts that would be triggered by your brain would they be same as those that your friend or any other human for that matter would experience? Probably not. The story or inferences we make from exposure to the same stimuli are very different.
Let’s consider this in a productive work context. Two programmers are given a task to create an e-commerce store. What are the chances that their code would be exactly the same? Even if they choose the same technology to work with, their personal footprint would be all over the code. To me, this what makes us human stand-part from AI. The subjective inferences we draw.
A design thinking workshop was conducted as part of my curriculum at IMT. Our batch of 45 students grouped into 8 teams. All of us were shown a series of four pictures. We were to build a story around these pictures. Each team one story. The environment was the same. Time allotted was the same. The context set by the professor was the same. The only difference was individual perceptions and personalities.
The pictures showcased the transformation in the cab industry. From horse-cart to Uber. However, no written description or context about the images was given to us. This we only realised at the end of the exercise what the pictures actually meant. But well that’s not the point.
Each team came up with radically different stories. My team talked about Human evolution. How thoughtless evolution has created more problems than solutions. Another team enacted a romantic story of waiting on a woman. How through all these years of evolution, the man was waiting for her woman of dreams to get ready. A story on the parasitic nature of humans with an appeal to go green and engage in the sustainable environment was told. An alien race of smart gadgets taking over planet earth through Google Maps was narrated. And many more. Same Environment, Same Context, Same Time. Drastically different stories.
While AI might be able to mimic human intelligence in objective tasks, even with subjective context, the question is can AI derive subjective inferences. Until AI is not capable of this, we have little to fear. We might lose a few jobs to AI. There might be a bad phase. But just like we overcame the first industrial revolution, we will sail through the fourth. Resilience is what sets us, Human, apart.
PS: I acknowledge there are AI programs today that have the ability to compose music and create art. And in future there might come AI capable of subjective inferences, this article is just a loud thought on the current situation.
