AI Everywhere AI, which is short for Artificial Intelligence, is creeping into all our devices. In comes in many flavors from a simple choice calculation to one that could have life and death consequences. In a way, every piece of software which is programmed to make any type of decision is using artificial intelligence. What they are really doing in most cases is using the programmer’s ideas on what type of choices should be made. As AI advances this might change as software modeling the actions of the human brain is introduced. This software is designed to decide by itself what choices to make. There is even another weirder thing being introduced and that is cells from animal and human brains into computer programs. As these programs advance will we have a human brain grown in a lab making decisions in a computer program for us? We certainly seem to be headed that way. Tiny human brains have already been grown and many scientists have revolted against this practice because they feel they might have a chance of becoming sentient and possibly be suffering. The smart devices like the Echo and Portal along with others are endowed with a form of AI. They understand most of what we say and respond to what we ask. They are not perfect. For example, I asked my Echo Show, which is a smart device with a screen which is attached to a Ring doorbell with a camera to show the front door and many times it states front door is not available. I suppose this might have more to do with the connecting between the bell and the Show than a problem with the AI. Feeling lonely, especially in this time of Covid19? You can ask the Echo to talk to you and it will, telling you different facts. If you ask it to hold a conversation it will hook you up to a social bot and you can have a complete conversation with it. Have you seen the new robotic toys on the market? Many of them contain a form of AI. One of the more famous ones was the Sony dog named Aibo. The dog learns about its environment and how to interact with people. It is quite pricey, selling for $2,899. It is about the closest thing to a real dog you can get. One of the problems is the battery technology. It has been said a full charge will only last about two hours. This is far from the time a real dog would stop moving around. Would you like AI in your appliances? New refrigerators are coming out that will order the items inside them which are running low. Are you comfortable with your refrigerator making decisions for you? I am not so sure about that. If I decide I didn’t like the brand of peanut butter I used would I have to alter the program to enter the new brand before the old brand was reordered? How many of us eat and drink the same things every time we reorder? There are certain food staples we might need all the time like milk, eggs, and so forth. I guess we could have the refrigerator order these but we would still need to order the rest of the things we want. Smart televisions with AI have already caused problems for us. It has been found many listen to our conversations as do our other smart devices. Are people willing to give up some privacy for convenience? I don’t like that idea, but to tell the truth everywhere we go nowadays we are losing the privacy battle. Thanks to all these smart devices, privacy is dead, it just isn’t buried yet. When we go outside cameras are snapping photos of us or taking videos. They might even be running our pictures against facial recognition software to make sure we aren’t wanted criminals. Some people have already been arrested in error because of this software. This is AI software performing its assigned duty. Maybe the scariest use for AI is in weapons. There are quite a few engineers and scientists who think some weapons should be autonomous and make their own determination on who to kill. They tell us not to worry, but never mention the fact these weapons will be run by computers and theoretically could be hacked by the enemy. That is only one reason to fear these types of weapons. Another reason is weapons like this which make their own decisions might cost us our humanity. We may no longer feel guilty for killing the enemy and civilians because it will be easy to say we had nothing to do with it, the machine made the choice. The machines won’t care where they go to kill the enemy unless specifically told not to go into hospitals and such, but knowing the military there will probably be no such restrictions on the AI. One area which seems to have an advantage to being run by AI is driving cars. While we have heard some stories about AI cars crashing at times, it is so infrequent as to be almost nonexistent. As far as piloting airplanes I am not as sure. Humans can be quite capable under emergencies like the time a plane had to land in the Hudson River and landed perfectly. Could an AI be programmed to handle every emergency? Drones are everywhere but a lot of the ones we could buy are more like remote controlled toys. The military drones are quite different and have all sorts of features controlled by AI. Much of these abilities are secret, but we do know about some. Certain fighter planes can control an entire fleet of AI drones which can also act on their own. The drones can probably also fly on their own and accomplish missions on their own without a remote pilot. I have heard about these things but I can’t verify them with certainty, but if we don’t have that ability yet, it is only a matter of time. One of the most interesting AI units is the Exoskeleton used by the military. A soldier climbs into it and it allows him or her to run without getting tired, and lift hundreds of pounds. In a firefight the soldier can take it off and it becomes a robot soldier which can fight on its own. If the soldier gets wounded and is able to climb back into the exoskeleton it will take the soldier back to base. There is no stopping the march toward AI and in wartime it will have more of an impact than nuclear weapons.
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