Should we be scared of artificial intelligence? Many think we should be and believe Terminator was a prophetic movie which showed artificial intelligence running computers which wanted to destroy humans. Maybe this question should better be directed to Nvidia. Nvidia is a large company which develops graphic chips and has moved into artificial intelligence in a really big way. Most computers are running on a core known as a CPU or central processing unit. Nvidia uses GPUs which are graphics processing units. Recently Nvidia has moved into the area of self-driving automobiles. When they did it, it was done differently than everybody else. They are using an artificial intelligence which works on artificial neurons similar to how our brain works. What has scared a lot of people is the fact this computer has learned how to control cars by watching human drivers, so it has actually taught itself how to drive. Many scientists and engineers are worried that one day the system will do something it shouldn’t and they will never find out why, because the system is so complicated. Sound familiar? Could it be the system will decide they don’t need humans anymore and just run down anybody that is in front of the car? While I don’t think this will happen, I do believe there should be some sort of checks and balances on all artificial intelligence systems and if something goes wrong we should be able to trace the fault and fix it.

There are some people who think artificial intelligence may be used to create artificial people. I guess it depends on what we consider an artificial person. If we talking about robots they already exist and even with a super artificial intelligence inside of them we can easily distinguish them from humans. If we are talking about cyborgs things may get a lot harder. What worries some people is the fact a human personality may be able to be adopted by an artificial intelligence, perhaps one which has already lived and which we have a lot of data on. As time goes by our personalities may be recorded somehow and they could be used in this way, by having them adopted by machines. The machines may look and act just like the person they are copying. In a way this sounds almost like a ghost story and I guess as creepy as this would be, it might be even creepier if the person was still alive and copies of him or her were all around. One has to wonder if there were several Einsteins working together what they might come up with.

One area which could really lend itself to artificial intelligence might be medical diagnostic machines. If a diagnostic machine had some intelligence it might be able to not only check for a particular disease, but if it didn’t find it go on to check for others which made sense. For example engineers may be able to build one machine that would accomplish many different tasks such as an MRI, a PET scan and many other devices all built into one. If the machine finds nothing in the first test it would just continue on to the next logical one and so forth. We are finding intelligent diagnostic machines are now doing just as good a job of diagnosing disease as a Doctor and they will only get better as time goes by. What worries some people is the fact machines could start looking like us. One only has to watch the progress which is being made in Japan to see there are already machines that look quite human. Their movements are not quite perfect yet, but they are getting there and their appearances are at the point where they could fool someone into thinking they were actually humans.

Some scientists believe we should try and develop machines which are as human like as we can make them, because they believe they would make perfect astronauts. In a way it could be a logical step in space travel since a machine, no matter how human it looks, would not be bothered by radiation, the need to eat or sleep and also would not be bothered by long boring journeys into space. If something went wrong with the ship they were on, they probably wouldn’t even need a spacesuit to go outside and make repairs. When you think about it an alien seeing one of these creatures would believe they were alive and if we saw an alien doing these things we would think the same way when maybe we were looking at a machine. In our search for alien life we may not be able to tell the difference between what is an actual biological being and what is a scientifically created being.

The military would love to have soldiers which were smart and yet not human, because it would eliminate not only the fear factor, but the moral factor as well. I don’t like to think about what an artificial life form might do. It is one thing if it were programmed with ethics, but something entirely different if it had a mandate to do things like find out certain information by any means when it captured someone. For all we know this type of soldier might be programmed in a way to never take prisoners which would make it evil in the eyes of most humans. While it is hard to think of machines being evil, the people that program them certainly can be and these machines would just be an extension of those programmers.

I am not a fan of making machines to look exactly like humans. Some scientists believe this makes them more accepted if they are in positions of taking care of someone, like an elderly person for example. I think they should retain a difference so no one forgets they are not people. This way when something goes wrong and it eventually will, people will say it was just a machine and needs to be fixed, otherwise it may be thought of as a person and whatever it does would then be a huge disappointment or even thought of as a crime by those who are relying on it. Artificial intelligence is coming and it will be in most of our devices very soon. There is not much we can do about it, except maybe pass laws limiting some of the ways it can be programmed. The last thing we need are machines which have no reason to respect human life.