Benefits and Risks of Artificial Intelligence | What is Artificial Intelligence | Artificial Intelligence VS Humans

Benefits and Risks of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is all up in the air, from Siri to self-driving cars, the ground-breaking concept is apparently on the rise. For Marvel comic lovers, we must surely have heard of Jarvis. Just like Jarvis in Iron Man, science fiction typically depicts AIs as robots but in truth Artificial Intelligence (AIs) encompasses much more than that.

From autonomous weapons to Google’s search algorithms to IBM’s Watsons, AI has got everything covered.

For now, the Artificial Intelligence that the tech gurus have been able to develop is known as the narrow or weak AI as it is designed to carry out specific narrow tasks. For instance, at present, AI covers only weak tasks such as internet searches, driving a car, facial recognition and so on.

Despite the fact that the narrow AI is capable of outperforming human beings in almost every aspect you can think of, technological researchers are hungry for me. They are not satisfied!

Their long term goal for AI is to create what is known as the general AI (AGI or strong AI) as it is guaranteed to outperform human beings at almost every cognitive task. To be honest, I’m still struggling to believe that can ever be possible.

The quest to ensure AI is beneficial to the society has driven major researches in various fields such as law and economics and even technical topics including control, validity, verification and security. Isn’t it fascinating that an AI system can be controlled to perform whatever task you desire; could control your pacemaker, jet, car or even your power grid.

The question we keep asking ourselves is that what if the quest for strong AI succeeds and then backfires, in the sense that, an AI system becomes more intelligent than human beings. Imagine a machine performing cognitive tasks at a faster and better rate than human beings. Won’t that be devastating?

Such an intelligent system could undergo self-improvement, setting off an intelligence explosion leaving human beings looking like the early men.  Such intelligence could ensure that the human intellect is left far behind.

Looking on the bright side though, such super intelligent systems might play a huge role in the eradication of poverty, disease and war, and so the invention of strong AI might be the greatest thing to ever happen to the human race, at least for now.

We always have pessimists and in this case, they exist. Some people still doubt that researchers will ever be able to develop the strong AI but there are also a “few” who believe the concept is very achievable as it will be very beneficial to the whole world. For the record, I happen to be a member of that “few”.

Just like everything in this world that has its benefits, they also bring along some risks and Artificial Intelligence is not straying from that trend.

Time is advancing, seasons are changing and the technological world is keeping up with the times. We just hope that when (pessimists will use the word “if”) this strong AI is finally developed; its benefits will outweigh its potential risks.

I remain optimistic about the concept!