Artificial Intelligence Revisited Today, I would like to talk about artificial intelligence because it seems to be on the minds of many people. Some people are very scared and it seems some movies which don’t show AI in a good light may have some responsibility. Movies like Terminator and The Matrix didn’t help people with their fears on the subject. It is amazing to me how some movies can influence peoples’ minds, even those movies which are completely fiction. Unlike these people, the ones which are scared of AI, there are engineers and scientists who are figuratively ready to throw parties over the advances being made in this field. They believe AI can be sufficiently controlled. Then there is the military which wants to use AI to kill the enemy. This runs contrary to what scientists have thought when they endorsed the laws of robotics which were laid out by Isaac Asimov who was actually a famous science fiction writer of his time. Basically, the laws state the robot must protect humans and itself after that. We shouldn’t be kidding ourselves about AI. It is coming and there is nothing we can do to prevent it since there will always be some rogue nation wanting to develop it, just like nuclear bombs. The genie is out of the bottle. If we just see robots replacing humans on the field of battle that would probably be a good thing, but robots fighting humans not so good. When I used the term robots, it also includes drones and all sorts of other machines capable of making independent decisions of life and death. Some scientists are saying just the opposite of what the famous scientist Stephen Hawking warned before his death, which was AI could mean the end of the human race. Even the famous industrialist Elon Musk is warning us about how dangerous AI might be. The scientists supporting the development of AI believe the benefits will send the human race into an incredible future. There is no denying there might be some incredible advances made by AI in many different disciplines. We might finally get a cure for many different diseases and find out the cause for cancer and conquer it. There are just so many areas which could be improved by it and when we think of it being used in conjunction with quantum computing, there seems to be no limit to what we might discover. This technology might even take us to the stars. One of the problems with technology which includes AI is there always seems to be a down side, and the one for AI could be very dark and dangerous. This depends of course on the programmers at this stage. After all, AI is a computer program being enhanced by hardware which is always improving. Even more worrying to many is the fact we may get to a point where problems which effect the entire world are being solved by machines which somehow, not only have artificial intelligence, but have reached what we would call sentience. Sentience is the point where we would declare them a life form. They might decide they want to populate the earth and replace us according to some people. We already have seen problems in relatively simple programs which were written for AI in which the programs behaved in unexpected ways. This certainly is something we can’t have in serious situations. Have AI programs really acted on their own, or has some error in the programming yet to be found. AI programs are like taking medicine. We think we know all about the medicine, but when we take it with others, we find out this can cause certain reactions which were unexpected. Mixing certain commands in an AI program might in some cases do the same thing. Scientists have announced they have created artificial neurons. For years, they have been working on devices which they want to operate much as our brains do. Besides the artificial neurons, an announcement was made stating there is a new AI system which has been named a semantic decoder which they have developed, which can create a stream of text from what a person is thinking. Obviously, this can be used for good and for evil. One of the pluses is it might be able to be used on those who can not speak. It has often been said people in comas can hear, perhaps we will be able to communicate with them in the future using this device. The down side is it sounds to me like the perfect way for people to have their thoughts read. This is just about our last bastion of privacy. A couple of different places have made this announcement. One place states an MRI machine used with AI can accomplish this. Speaking about AI, it is now being said it is possible with the use of the artificial neurons for next generation AI to mimic complex brain abilities. I am not sure exactly how complex are the activities the scientists want to mimic. Will artificial neurons allow for an AI to become sentient or at least seem it is? How does all this fit in with the mini human brains being created in labs and studies? On top of all that, is there some point where we will be able to create a human with the help of AI? I personally do not like where this is going. If we would create AI which could be of immense help to humans in many different ways that is one thing, but it is hard to ignore the dark side of all this. Even if some kind of ethics commission is set up for AI projects, it will still not be adhered to. We might think it is, but in secret those military industrial complexes will be turning out deadly AI killing machines along with all the other countries of the world. Even if some big shot politician comes out and says we aren’t doing that, I wouldn’t believe it. I am certainly not against advancement, but there are certain things which take decision making out of the hands of humans which we should never think about and one is creating killing machines which made those decisions. If all the world’s countries create these machines it is against the survival of the human race, not to mention the fact it is a stupid thing to do. I want to see us advance it ways that make our lives better because we become healthier, happier and live longer. That is what I call progress.
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