Should we be afraid of artificial intelligence?
For me, this is a simple question with an even simpler, two letter answer: no.
Humans tend to be afraid of what they dont understand.
Fear is often blamed for racism, homophobia and other sources of discrimination.
So its no wonder it also applies to new technologies they are often surrounded with a certain mystery.
Some technological achievements seem almost unrealistic, clearly surpassing expectations and in some cases human performance.
These allow a machine to learn a task without being programmed with explicit instructions.
This may sound spooky but the truth is it is all down to some rather mundane statistics.
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There are many different methods that allow us to achieve this.
We have already provided the possible answers it can only be one of (a-z).
As a consequence, the machine over time improves its performance and learns to recognize the alphabet.
Humans, however, are good at reading.
It has also been told the rules of the game.
Toddlers versus robots
Now does that make the AI Go player smarter than a human?
AI is very specialized to particular key in of tasks and it doesnt display the versatility that humans do.
The fact that AI is dubbed intelligent is ultimately down to the fact that it can learn.
But even when it comes to learning,it is no match for humans.
In fact, toddlers can learn by just watching somebody solving a problem once.
Toddler brains are amazing.
Personally, I am more concerned by how humans use AI.
This is an important and frequently neglected aspect as we are often obsessed with performance and less with understanding.
Say for instance that we want to design a machine to evaluate the ability of potential students in engineering.
Probably a terrible idea, but let us follow it through for the sake of the argument.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are tools.
They can be used in a right or a wrong way, like everything else.
It is the way that they are used that should concerns us, not the methods themselves.
Human greed and human unintelligence scare me far more than artificial intelligence.
