TECHNOLOGY
The Greatest Peril of AI May Not Be What We Think
We need to guard against outsourcing our reasoning
The world is in a tizzy over Artificial Intelligence. Every day you either see news about the miracles wrought by it or the existential danger it represents. There are enough dystopian tales of a complete takeover or enslavement — take your pick — of the human race.
But if we cut through the hysteria, the real danger lies somewhere else. The larger peril of AI is not what it will do or become capable of doing.
It is what we will become incapable of doing.
AI has striking parallels with another paradigm-shattering development that molded our world anew a few years ago — the Internet. However, the speed with which AI has inserted itself in our daily discussions is orders of magnitude faster than the Internet.
Look at the name itself, as a sign of this influence. The Internet eventually got contracted to the ‘net’. In the initial days, people used to call it the World Wide Web, the information superhighway, and other such unwieldy names. Artificial Intelligence has already become so familiar that nobody needs to write out its full name anymore. The difference is that this happened in a fraction of the time it took for the Internet to…
