The Future of AI - But At What Cost?
While we may sing of the wonders Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have on business and every other sphere of human interactions, we should be worried that these machines or systems we are building will not have a mind of their own. Several misconceptions have become popular that AI will still be subject to human control. This is not true. Research into AI has shown that these systems are programmed to out-negotiate, out-fox, and out-think us. Negotiation experts believe that AI can be used to improve negotiation tactics. If that is a good thing, we would have to wait for a couple of years to find out. There are pieces of evidence that AI beats the best humans at games like chess, Go, poker, and any of the games that require intelligence.
AI systems run chatbots, help detect fraud, help people drive and find locations, help to diagnose medical conditions, help in recruitment processes, translate languages, read emotions, create music. AI does everything, literally. The truth is, AI systems are built with datasets of human interactions, such that they can forecast our reactions and actions. Now, that’s a lot of power.
You know what’s going to have even more power? Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Billions of dollars are currently being spent on AGI to exceed human-level cognition. It will share similarities with human-like self-awareness, survival first, self-interests. Just as you have seen in Sci-Fi movies where robots will have a mind of their own, this is exactly what will happen. The new AGI will not be in our image. Louis Rosenberg, in a piece on VentureBeat, says artificial minds will not be created with rules that make them think like us; rather, “engineers feed massive datasets into simple algorithms that automatically adjust their own parameters, making millions upon millions of tiny changes to their structure until an intelligence emerges.”
Rosenberg, the developer of the first augmented reality system for the US Air Force, believes it is false to think that by training AI on data on human behaviors, they will act exactly as humans do. AI creatures will not be humans, but they will know every intricacy, exploit every weakness humans have, make better logical decisions, make worse illogical decisions, and their minds will be inexhaustible; nothing compared to ours. For proper context, they will have far superior minds. Oh, they will not share our morals. Their proclivities will be based not on what is good or bad but on what they want to do.
These AI creatures will wear human bodies, which we will create to make them look like they are a part of us. Only that they will not be of us. They will live among us, but they will be superior to us in intelligence.
The Danger?
It is undeniable that life is easy with the help of AI system, but at what cost? This is the big question. Like every innovation, it is difficult to contain AI. Every innovation has the potential to be subjected to ethical standards even if checks are put in place. A poll conducted by Pew Research suggested that some professionals believe there will be a need to implement “ethical AI” over concerns in the nearest future, as soon as 2030.
While some professionals are worried about the effect of AI in the wrong hands and used for adversarial purposes, there is the category of professionals creating AI systems, which Rob Reich, a Stanford professor of political science, describes as lacking “a dense institutional footprint of professional norms and ethics.” He further went on to say that AI scientists are “like late-state teenagers who have just come into a recognition of their poers in the world, but whose frontal lobes are not yet sufficiently developed to give them social responsibility.” With this revelation, the provision of professional standards and ethics needs to be accelerated to prevent the uncouth use of this technology.
