There’s no shortage of dire warnings about the dangers of artificial intelligence these days.
Modern prophets, such as physicist Stephen Hawking and investor Elon Musk, foretell the imminent decline of humanity. With the advent of artificial general intelligence and self-designed intelligent programs, new and more intelligent AI will appear, rapidly creating ever smarter machines that will, eventually, surpass us.
When we reach this so-called AI singularity, our minds and bodies will be obsolete. Humans may merge with machines and continue to evolve as cyborgs.
Is this really what we have to look forward to?
Not really, no.
AI, a scientific discipline rooted in computer science, mathematics, psychology, and neuroscience, aims to create machines that mimic human cognitive functions such as learning and problem-solving.
Since the 1950s, it has captured the public’s imagination. But, historically speaking, AI’s successes have often been followed by disappointments – caused, in large part, by the inflated predictions of technological visionaries.
In the 1960s, one of the founders of the AI field, Herbert Simon, predicted that “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.” (He said nothing about women.)
Marvin Minsky, a neural network pioneer, was more direct, “within a generation,” he said, “… the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved.”
But it turns out that Niels Bohr, the early 20th century Danish physicist, was right when he (reportedly) quipped that, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”
Today, AI’s capabilities include speech recognition, superior performance at strategic games such as chess and Go, self-driving cars, and revealing patterns embedded in complex data.
These talents have hardly rendered humans irrelevant.
But AI is advancing. The most recent AI euphoria was sparked in 2009 by much faster learning of deep neural networks.
Artificial intelligence consists of large collections of connected computational units called artificial neurons, loosely analogous to the neurons in our brains. To train this network to “think,” scientists provide it with many solved examples of a given problem.
Suppose we…
The post Is Artificial Intelligence A (Job) Killer? appeared first on FeedBox.