Almost
every aspect in our lives is processed by computers, and many work places are
replaced by machines. In recent years there has increased the development of AI. Most big tech companies have
an Artificial Intelligence project, they are searching for experts, and are
ready to pay millions of dollars to help it done. Heads of World Powers are interested
in the development of AS as it will ensure victory in a modern battlefield that
is Computer Science.
Artificial
Intelligence is on a fledgling level, but already achieves better results in
university entrance exams than half of the students. This topic is worthy of
note and I encourage you to watch this TED talk.
Questions:
1. What is
the reason that students get worse results than the machine? Do you think we
should blame the education system?
2. Do you
think we should be afraid of AI? Will it try to exterminate us like in the
Terminator movies? Why? Why not?
Sources:
Comments
Of course we should be afraid of AI. When it comes to work IT and some creative areas are save for now, but I don't think it will last forever.
But what that's what I'm thinking about AI at all:
Human brain has been evolved over hundreds of thousands of years by many random(!) genetic mutations that helped us to survive. That's why our brain is not perfect: we can easily remember images, but it's hard for us to remember texts or numbers, because it wasn't needed for survival 5000 years ago(just a moment in terms of evolution).
But artificial intelligence is a whole other thing. It has a perfect memory; it can process a huge amount of texts in a seconds.
Evolution as a mechanism cannot improve something on purpose - it is not "interested" in making people smarter. But now it's not evolution who rules the world now - it's humanity. AI was created on purpose, and I believe that if evolution could make us, we can try too.
There are other striking examples of AI winning with our current systems and even human reviewers. For example: MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab created a program that generated a gibberish scientific publications, which they submitted to peer-view journals. Tens of these articles where accepted and published by Springer and IEEE.
We should fear AI if we have an employment that involves structured problem solving tasks or routine physical work. AI is not a magic box that can do anything. It is a set of mathematical theories that can solve selected problems. AI methods used broadly today (Artificial Neural Networks, SVM, Markov Decision Process, naive Bayes classifier) were developed in 40s, 50s and 60s and have not changed since then. The math behind them is still the same and has the same limitations.
As far as I know, AI is not and will not be a threat to human race anytime soon, unless it would be specifically trained and developed this way. Would it be still an AI fault, though? Or just another human mistake?
When it comes to students getting lower results than a machine it's just the way things are. Apes are known for a very specific form of intelligence, that is pattern recognition. That's what allowed us to come up with all the technological advancements and no wonder why we also base a lot of AI functionalities on the same skill we posses. The reason why machines can outperform us is because we made them for this reason. Personally I think it's a really bad trend, because we as animals are inherently short term planning form of life. Can't wait to see when the power shuts down and the hordes of skill-less people roam the earth unable to even wipe off their buttocks.
Nowadays AI is growing rapidly. For sure it will replace people at work, but when it comes to humans life - I don't know. We should be aware the danger AI brings.
It seems to me that there is no need to be afraid of artificial intelligence in the next 10 years, or even until the moment when the artificial intellect will be able to independently make its own creative decisions not based on information stored on it`s harddrive.
Call me luddite, but I am frightened about possibilities of what AI can become. Imagine that one day human will create a machine that can feel, think and make moral decisions. How long will it take for this machine to understand that he is better than any human on Earth? What it is going to do with this knoweledge?
The machine never has a worse day - stress has no effect for it.
A robot once learned something will always do it perfectly with no mistake. In my opinion this is not fault of a education system.
I don't think so we should be afraid of AI. AI is developing very fast, that is true, but i think in the near future there are no chance to replace people by machines in every field.
Robots can improve our lives, make life easier and better for us. We should develop them and remember that people are creating robots not the other way around.
Should we be afraid of AI? At this moment certainly not. Current AI might be good in one field, for example playing games, helping discover cancer based on photos etc., but it is not so good in resolving all those tasks together. However, this might change very quickly. That's why it is good to create some organisation to watch our AI development and create some safety regulations. As far as I know, there is already such organisation containing people from Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. (companies, that has greatest AI at this moment)
We shouldn't be afraid of AI, we should use it to our benefit as much as possible. Those repetitive task jobs which don't add any value to person doing it? Give it to AI/robots and let pepople do something which will develop, exapnd them (like building more robots and creating smarter AI so people don't have to work but live in utopia ;)).
That said, there's a fundamental difference between memorizing and comprehending information. We can create a machine capable of recognizing cat pictures, be we cannot really convene to it the relevance those particular pictures have to us. Not in a way that would make the machine understand.
Since the dawn of computers science-fiction authors have been dwelling on the question: Can machines think? It's important to understand however that machine brains don't work the way human brains do, at least for now. If so, maybe the error of such thinking lies in the basic assumption that we can quantify the machine intelligence using the same measuring devices we use to quantify it in humans.
Another interesting by-product of the sci-fi genre is the fear of sentient machines. I realize it's the most popular outcome, as it makes for a good action movie plot. It's not however the only one.
We might one day find ourselves in a future where all the basic jobs are performed by machines. But does that mean that the humans won't be needed any more? And if so, what would we do with all that spare time?
I found the following video to contain some interesting point on this topic. (made in 2014)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
Besides, machine can memorize everything and store it as "pure information" (e.g. the answer to 1. is "We did something, it was good [500 word essay]"), but for now it can't use it abstractly- it doesn't understand the sense of the essay, it just "knows" that it is the answer for 1.
As for the education system - everyone knows its bad. Even though we are in private university, we had our timetables filled with table-fillers, just so the abstract norms are met, and "we had xx hours of yyy, so in theory we know zzz, even though we will never use it again".
>Do you think we should be afraid of AI? Will it try to exterminate us like in the Terminator movies? Why? Why not?
The AI is as dangerous, as the hardware its connected to - T1000 wouldn't kill anyone, if its AI was written into... a toaster?
If it was a highly advanced, military-grade toaster that shoots .50 cal and nukes any enemies within 500km range, then it would be dangerous, otherwise, the hardware defines the dangerousness of the software...
2. No. At least, not now. Machines could have started to exterminate us or to do something people don't like if they had been able to create and think/want something. But they can't desire anything, they are only processes, programs. And as the speaker said, they don't read and don't understand.
I agree with the speaker from the video, many people will lose their jobs in the future. Machines could do many tasks with fewer efforts so that companies will economize.
Can I have a robot which will do my homework, please? :)
I can't say whether or not should we be afraid of AI. It's too early to state. Such movies are directed just to shock or thrill and most of the time the story has nothing to do with reality.
AIs don't have this problem. They can storage anything and access anything in given point of time. This means that a human that scored the highest possible degree in this test would perform significantly worse after just several months if not weeks, assuming that he wouldn't do similar tests every day. Machine, once it scores X, will only score X or higher, assuming the actual material for the test is fixed.