Artificial Intelligence: What it is, What it isn't, and Why We Aren’t Going to be Living Out “Terminator” Any Time Soon (Unfortunately)
Almost every single person who lives in the developed world interacts with Artificial I on the daily; whether it be though automated phone calls, search engines, Siri, Google Homes, social media feeds, or video games just to name a few.
People seem to LOVE to talk about AI. And while it is a fascinating emerging field that is going to insurmountably impact how we are going to live our day-to-day lives, but a lot of people seem to have a strong misunderstanding about what and where AI technology is.
A lot of people seem to think a few thing about AI:
- they will replace all the jobs
- they are smarter than us
- they are going to take over the world
And not all of these are COMPLETELY incorrect, but they simply lack context. So let me break down a little bit about why your ‘Terminator’ fantasy isn’t going down next year.
AI is a big blanket term for a lot of different things.

So firstly, lets break down some the different types of AI and sub categories of AI so we can all have a better understanding of what AI is up to.
There are 3 big categories of AI:

And right now? We literally ONLY have ANI’s.
Now, this might be a little hard to believe for some of you.
“NO, on god I saw that weird Sophia robot thing talking to people.”
Yep. Still not even AGI.
And with ANI’s, there are a lot of different Sub-Categories
CNN’s, RNN’s, Auto Encoders, Variational Autoencoders, GANS ect.
Each of these are really good at one thing. One super specific task. Like recognizing patterns, removing water marks, identifying computer generated faces. But notice how I didn't list world-ruling.
Right now, AI is really good at things that we as humans are really not good at. Like data storage and retrieval.
Even if you are the best doctor in to world, you’re still only human. You could have hundreds, maybe even thousands of diseases, symptoms, treatments, drugs, etc, all locked up inside your head. But a computer could have thousands, or millions.
And all of their information is going to be clearer, more in depth, and faster to retrieve than any information a human could ever hope to memorize.
Because we as a species aren’t built for memorizing and spitting out information. We aren’t built for repetitive tasks and working doing the exact thing every day from 9–5. But machines are.
And right now, that is what AI is for. It is a technology that has the capability of doing the jobs that humans aren’t built to do. And they are doing it faster, stronger, and better than we can.
But, to reiterate, these algorithms only do specific, data driven tasks. They don’t think.
They can take all this data and use all these different filters and math to give an output. But thats it. That specific task is all they are programmed to do.
Just because something can recognize faces doesn’t mean it can take over the world. Again, these are machienes. They can only do what they are programed for. They have no independent thought. But we do.
Again, machines are good at what we aren’t. But we dont suck at everything.
Creative thought. Thats what we have. And I’ll start worrying about computers really taking over the world.
Ok, so, AI isnt going to Terminator us all out of existence. But there are still some scary uses of AI.
For example, that one thing the AI is good at is pinpointing targets in warzone. Or making super-powered propaganda.
So yes, AI is super important and scary and amazing and cool af. And we all need to be educated on whats really happening.