Why Artificial Intelligence Won’t Take Over the World

Think back to the last time you were on a plane. Remember hearing these words? “Even though oxygen is flowing, the plastic bag may not inflate.” Well, it would be a lot more reassuring if the bag would go ahead and inflate. Why doesn’t it inflate? Why in 2023 can we still not inflate the bag? Perhaps AI can tell us.

The recent buzz over ChatGPT seems to have rekindled fears of programmers losing their jobs, or a little farther down the slippery slope, even a Matrix-style robot takeover. (If you haven’t heard of ChatGPT yet, I’d recommend checking it out post haste.) It’s unlikely we would ever accidentally allow computers to gain that kind of power over us. Otherwise, AI would need to take control by force, but as anyone who has recently used a navigation app knows, they still won’t have a clue where to find a parking spot.

That being said, all the over-hype is making me wonder if we haven’t voluntarily relinquished control already. Thankfully, the hype seems to be dying down a bit now that the big LLM contenders are starting to lose that brand-new shine and people are realizing that AI content is noticeably inferior to human creativity.

The movie Transcendence depicts a human intelligence doing what people fear computers may become capable of. Asimov’s three laws of robotics aside, I want to reassure you that such a thing cannot happen anyway.