Artificial intelligence is not sci-fi. It’s there already. In your news feed, movie suggestions, purchases. And it’s going to get bigger. What is A.I.?
So much spoken of, adorned and hated, trusted and scorned through decades.
Artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to perform and think like humans.
A.I. works the same way as neural networks in our brain do. More importantly, I believe it is the most beautiful doing by humanity : this extraction and replication of learning capacity that can now be transferred to the machines.
As a matter of fact, when we learnt “knowledge is power”, we were wrong. It has a cap.
Learning does not. Learning is the real power, whereas learning to learn is a super-power, just to quote some of the mavericks of human excellence and ultimate performance.
According to Steven Kotler, who happened to study world’s best performers in all walks of life and write “Tomorrowland” and “Superhuman” (that has nothing to do with your local Halloween costume-hero), we can hack learning by detecting similarity patterns across a variety of data, which means by acquiring a system level view. So can A.I.
Neuroplasticity.
Taking into account the ability of our brain to adapt to new inputs of information and change accordingly, hence enhance capacity, we are capable of much more and much better than we are open to, at this moment in time. So are the machines. They learn, achieve, become better, without cognitive biases as such.
The Good.
Artificial intelligence is the replica of the neural networks in our brain, thus it can transform healthcare, finances, longevity, democracy, humanity. It can create efficient solutions to problems we have stalled to address so far, resulting in abundance and improved life quality.
We do not have to alienate from A.I. and treat it as a different kind, different species.
The machine is an isolated setting to transplant our ability to learn and improve, lacking any distracting factors that can be left for us to enjoy, such as emotions, biological circumstances and being human with all the perks that come with it.
We are humble enough to teach our kids to become better, faster and quicker than us. Why wouldn’t we teach the machine? Here’s why:
The Bad.
Steven Hawking, Elon Musk and others seem to be worried where this would lead. What if general A.I. , with fully capable self-teaching and self-enhancing ability, takes control? There is a space to worry. As we do not know what we do not know.
However, the possibilities and frontiers opened, shrink the fear. After all, where would we be, if we were afraid? All human innovation has kicked off with tinkering and walking out of “normality”, back in the day.
The Ugly
Making human-like robots that would perform human tasks better than we do, looks disturbing to many. Especially if we stayed where we are with the culture of learning and did not improve. Especially if we made them like us, but faster and smarter than us. How could we emotionally deal with these creations?
Treating the machine, which is learning about the world, as our “alter ego” that can charge us for better decisions and performance, could be the key. Yet, I do not know, and I cannot know what I do not know.
So what?
One step at a time. There is a guy called Tim Ferriss, whom one cannot be bored with.
He has hacked learning. And he unveils that here: http://fourhourworkweek.com/category/the-tim-ferriss-experiment-tfx/
He claims you can do it, if he can. “Look,” he says, “I wasn’t a great learner. I sucked at foreign languages as a kid. I didn’t learn to swim until I was 30. This is exactly why I know this stuff works. If I can do it, anyone can do it.”
This means we can become better, just like our machines. Maybe then, there would be less stigma and inequality? And less people starving or children labouring? Or less people dying from cancer and wrong treatment? Less fatalities and anger?
Who knows? After all, we do not know, what we do not know.
The A.I. is learning to know, cause it already knows how to learn.
Before a downfall the heart is haughty,
but humility comes before honour. Proverbs 18:12
