No, AI Isn’t Going to Kill You, but It Will Cause Social Unrest

Growing up a Star Trek fan I believe we can create a better society tomorrow. I subscribe to Pinker’s Better Angels theory, despite some occasional backslides encountered on the road of history. As such, I see AI bringing a better future — in the long run. In the short term, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. Star Trek itself didn’t do much with AI, other than Data who was a one-of-a-kind android. The rest of Hollywood, on the other hand, has given us a variety of potential AI nightmare scenarios. There are robot uprisings on a per capita basis (Blade Runner, Westworld), a global AI against humanity as a whole (Terminator, The Matrix, Avengers: Age of Ultron), AI in the military (Robocop, Minority Report-albeit not quite traditional AI), and one-off AI chaos (2001: A Space Odyssey). There are also friendlier, or at least less hostile, outcomes ranging from AI outgrowing us (Her), to being a new, friendly type of entity (Short Circuit). Classic sci-fi stories from Asimov often get more nuanced than Hollywood in the implications. AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) also known as strong AI, which is what people see in movies of AI, that can think across a wide variety of tasks, is a long way off. A computer can beat us in chess or detect cancer on an image better than a human, but that software can’t then expound on who is cuter, WALL-E or Number 5. It’s similar to how the robots that can assemble cars or paint a Rembrant are unable to take the first step in rock climbing. It’s not just a lack of legs, it’s a lack of knowledge how to use legs. They are purpose built and not general. This is known as weak AI or narrow AI; it’s where we are today. We may one day have to fight robots for the survival of humanity, just like we may one day drive flying cars and live on the moon. I use these references because they were first promised to us some 70 years ago but have not yet come to pass and may not in my lifetime. Roy Amara famously said, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” (Consider how computers today compare to the computers on the original Star Trek series.) So, while an AIpocalypse may come to pass, it’s further out than we think. <a href="https://medium.com/@markaherschberg/no-ai-isnt-going-to-kill-you-but-it-will-cause-social-unrest-part-1-e4a7b995950e">Read More</a>

No, AI Isn’t Going to Kill You, but It Will Cause Social Unrest — Part 1