Category Archives for Technology

Benefits & Risks of Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Are we Ready for it?

We all heard scary stories: artificial intelligence is here to take our jobs and control the world and robots can turn against us. but what should we trust at this point? I think the best we could do is to research the subject and make our own opinion. That’s what I’ve done for you in this post. I have research articles about Artificial Intelligence from well know and trusted source and curated the content for you. And it all starts when you ask

Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) a Good or a Bad thing for our Future?

When you type, “Is artificial intelligence…” into Google to see what it auto suggests as possible searches you may want to do, the number one suggestion you get is “Is artificial intelligence a threat?” Followed closely by, “Is artificial intelligence dangerous?” Why all of this fear around this technology, which to date hasn’t harmed anyone? I think there are two reasons.

One, we have a long tradition of fearing the things that we create, that they’re going to rise up and destroy us. You can see this in stories like Frankenstein. You can even see this further back in Greek plays, like Oedipus, that had children killing their parents.

The second source for it must be popular media and entertainment, which shows all kinds of scenarios where artificial intelligence goes berserk or decides to take over. We all know HAL in 2001, and all of the rest of the examples. Of course, the truth is that that does not in any way indicate what is going to happen. That’s a logical fallacy known as generalizing from fictional evidence. Interestingly, one of the autofill suggestions is, “Is artificial intelligence capitalized?” Even on that, there isn’t widespread agreement, which just goes to show where we are in the science.

Source: gigaom.com

True Benefits & Risks of Artificial Intelligence

From SIRI to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly. While science fiction often portrays AI as robots with human-like characteristics, AI can encompass anything from Google’s search algorithms to IBM’s Watson to autonomous weapons.

Everything we love about civilization is a product of intelligence, so amplifying our human intelligence with artificial intelligence has the potential of helping civilization flourish like never before – as long as we manage to keep the technology beneficial.

This implies that AI per se since it does possess not an evolved innate drive (Will), cannot ‘attempt’ to replace humankind. It becomes dangerous only if humans, for example, engage in foolish biological engineering experiments to combine an evolved biological entity with an AI. 

The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer convincingly shows that the ‘Will’ (in his terminology), i.e. an innate drive, is at the basis of human behavior. Our cognitive apparatus has evolved as a ‘servant’ of that ‘Will’. Any attempt to interpret human behavior as primarily a system of computing mechanisms and our brain as a sort of computing apparatus is therefore doomed to failure.

Because AI has the potential to become more intelligent than any human, we have no surefire way of predicting how it will behave. We can’t use past technological developments as much of a basis because we’ve never created anything that has the ability to, wittingly or unwittingly, outsmart us. The best example of what we could face may be our own evolution. People now control the planet, not because we’re the strongest, fastest or biggest, but because we’re the smartest. If we’re no longer the smartest, are we assured to remain in control?

Curated from Benefits & Risks of Artificial Intelligence – Future of Life Institute