Why am I fascinated by Artificial Intelligence?

Take a trip back to memory lane with me… Remember when you had some sort of personified toy? I bet you do, mine was a Spider-Man action figure. Although just a mindless, inexpressive and obscure figure, I would imagine it had similar characteristics as me, such as; walking, jumping, talking and most especially, problem solving! All these traits are important because they are all linked to intelligence.

Intelligence… What makes it so special? Why do our young minds create illusions that action figures, stuffed toys and so on can be intelligent? The simple answer is I do not know and there is nothing wrong with that but my fascination could stem from the book of Genesis, in which it says, “God created us in his image”, Maybe this is the reason for our or should I say my fascination with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

If God is this omnipotent, omniscient and all-benevolent being that chose to create man with similar traits to himself, it only makes sense if man eventually develops a choice to create something with similar traits to him/herself. None of these matter if you do not believe in God of-course, but no matter your belief or lack of belief we can all agree that we came from somewhere, either purposefully or randomly. If you believe in the randomness of our existence then your fascination with artificial intelligence might be rooted in the appreciation of what intelligence has produced and what it is likely to produce.

Deepmind, a London based artificial intelligence start-up that was acquired by Google in 2014 created an AI called AlphaGO. The purpose of this AI is to play the game of Go, a traditional Chinese board game that is said to have more possible combinations than the number of atoms in the detectable universe. AlphaGO defeated Lee Sedol, a legendary player of the game resulting in a national standstill whilst making headlines worldwide and the accomplishment has managed to captivate my attention ever since.

I am not going to bore you with the technical history of what AlphaGO did but one thing I can confirm is that it reminded me of when I was a kid, playing with my new Spider-Man action figure (illustrating a make-believe AI) and making it save Mary Jane Watson from a burning building (problem solving!), only that this was real and far more complicated than my youthful imagination…

Therefore, I believe that artificial intelligence started off in our minds just like how God thought of creating man. Futhermore, the book of Genesis says, “On the sixth day, God says; let us make man”, similarly we are in the 21st century and we are about to create a consciously self aware AI, something like JARVIS from the Iron-Man franchise.

Imagine an AI that can cure any disease known to man, solve challenging philosophical questions, figure out a way to distribute food and water equally amongst the world’s population. Likewise, imagine an AI that can destroy the planet like we have been doing since the industrial revolution, initiate a nuclear war and perceives mankind as the main threat to this beautiful planet, just imagine… How fascinating.

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