Artificial Intelligence
- What’s your take on “artificial intelligence”? What concerns or hopes about this developing technology strike you as particularly disconcerting and/or positive?
- How do both Newman and Chiang frame their argument as responding to a widely or commonly-held belief? In other words, in each case what is the general “they say” that these authors are responding to?
Artificial intelligence, commonly referred to as AI, is a scary idea. I think it has both advantages and disadvantages but more disadvantages in the future. I believe that eventually the world will be run by technology and there will be very few jobs that humans will be able to do. A good example of this is from the movie Wall-E, the movie was set in the future and all the people did was feed themselves. They sat in floating chairs and the robots did everything else on the spaceship. I think the most eye opening thing about AI is that it does not affect specific groups of people but effects everyone.
Ted Chiang talked specifically about the large scale negative effects of AI throughout the world. In the beginning of the article, he references a strawberry farm that is almost completely run my computers and then the strawberry farm ends up taking over the community. Although, this is extreme situation it does not seem totally improbable. I do believe that if we let it technology will eventually take over our lives. On the other hand, there are people like Judith Newman who believes that technology is not dangerous but helps people set out of their comfort zones. She talks about how the technology helps her son become more social. I think this is one of the few positive aspects of AI that a lot of people miss. It can help people with social disabilities or communication will people all over the world. It can help people be more polite, stop using bad words, and sometimes even become more social with different varieties of people. Both of these authors saw the good and bad of AI and I think it is important to note that with the good there is always some bad. However, I think specifically with AI if we let it control our lives the bad aspects will become out of hand.
