AI: The New Frankenstein?
Artificial Intelligence is a topic that has caught the interest of the masses since its earliest days and has spurred the imagination of thousands of authors and artists creating a sizable amount of books, movies, TV series and lately a couple of new religious cults revolving around this very interesting, but often misunderstood, topic. The first image that comes to one’s mind when he/she hears ‘AI’ is that of an extremely smart machine created by some human-geniuses who would eventually lose control over it, much like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. If you are familiar with Frankenstein you might find its comparison to AI a bit weird: after all, Frankenstein is rather a stupid and naïve creature but nonetheless dangerous. But, and here’s the twist, so is AI.
Contrarily to what most people believe, or rather, are made to believe, AI systems are not some super-genius machines capable of taking control of all computer systems around the world and destroying humanity. Humans, as we all know, are versatile creatures capable of learning and developing knowledge in different domains ranging from wood crafting to quantum mechanics and beyond. AI systems on the other hand, are mono-skilled systems that are, to put it simply, smart only in the task that they have been programmed to do. Self-developing AI systems, known as Machine Learning systems, are able to learn from the information they consume and develop new, smarter and more efficient ways to solving problems. In most cases, they become ‘smarter’ than their developers. Google’s AlphaGo has beaten Go’s world champion. IBM’s Watson has destroyed two Jeopardy! champions in their game. A new system currently in development by experts at Stanford University in collaboration with Google is able to diagnose skin cancer: in many cases, it has succeeded where revered dermatologists have failed. Examples are uncountable. AI systems might seem to be super intelligent and they are, but only in very narrow and specific domains. Although Siri might answer your weird questions in a rather logical way, it cannot take control of a self-driving car, for example.
AlphaGo might beat the world champion, but according to a research conducted by experts from the University of Nebraska and the Chinese Academy of Science, its IQ has not even reached that of a 6-year-old child, nor will it ever be able to surpass it. AI is dangerous, but its threat is not intrinsic to it: AI systems are innocent. Danger comes from developing and using them inappropriately.
AI systems are innocent. Danger comes from developing and using them inappropriately.
Humans are skilled in finding for every new invention an evil use. And just like any other human creation, AI is used in detrimental ways and here lies its true danger. Similar AI algorithms are used by search engines like Google, Bing or Baidu to help people in their enquiries and answering their questions on the one hand, and by intelligence agencies to acquire private information about people and firms thus breaching their privacy and exposing them to danger, on the other hand. The same geospatial AI system that is used by a non-profit called DataKind to find the best routes to connect poor remote villages in Africa to the closest clean water source is also being used by military forces to track and destroy ‘targets’, mostly killing innocent civilians. Another great threat that AI poses to humanity is replacing the human workforce in many domains ranging from car manufacturing to accounting and auditing and even (sadly) education, thus throwing millions of people into the unemployment pool. After all, most corporate leaders favor profit over the empowerment of people which makes a considerable part of the labor force in danger.
At the end of the day, it seems that the true threat to humans are humans themselves and the choices that we will make in the upcoming years will deeply affect our lives and many generations to come. Artificial Intelligence can empower humans, help them grow and solve many of the pressing problems that humanity still faces in society, the industry and the economy. It will surely spur new research into many domains eventually leading to unimaginable breakthroughs. Or, it can lead to our eventual destruction by magnifying the problems that we are already facing. Just like an experiment going wrong gave birth to Frankenstein, so will bad decisions in this domain give birth to potential threats as serious as nuclear weapons or global warming. The choice is ours to make, let’s hope we won’t make a mistake this time.
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