Are We Relying Too Much On Artificial Intelligence? I’ve been noticing some of the breakthroughs we are having and there was some of them which have been enabled by 3D printing. I think we have all seen by now articles about printing organs and such and just lately an article appeared which stated scientists have been able to print skin which has all the veins and arteries in it to keep it alive. Aside from its obvious use as a skin replacement in humans, it does make me wonder if sometime in the near future we would use something like this as the skin of a robot or better to call it a cyborg. If we make these machines too human, it may not be a good thing. I say this because people may expect too much of them by forgetting what they really are and expecting them to act like human beings. Sometimes people jump into the technology without thinking about the downside. If you don’t think there is a downside to technology you couldn’t be more wrong, let me give you a couple of examples. I went to a doctor’s office today with my wife. This doctor treats a lot of people who are elderly. Some of them have Parkinson’s which causes their hands to shake a lot, which in turn makes it impossible for them to use a keyboard. Somebody in a doctor’s office decided to automate the signing process using a touchscreen which is mounted like a monitor. In order to sign in you have to navigate seven or eight pages typing as you go along. Needless to say, most of the patients are not capable to do this so the receptionists have to do it for them. This has saved no time, because it takes longer and the people are for the most part incapable of using a shaky hand to type in the information. It was bad enough to install a system but to mount it on a stand like a monitor made it even harder for patients to type on it. This is a clear case with technology doing just the opposite of what it was designed to do, it made things much harder. Another example is how easy it is to print a gun. It seems nobody ever gave this much thought. I don’t know if there is a way to automatically prevent printers from doing this, but I also don’t think this problem was studied. One thing I don’t believe in his machines making life and death decisions and yet this is precisely what the military is working on. They want to create autonomous weapons which are controlled by artificial intelligence and which will know who the enemy is and when to kill him. With all the hacking going on in the world one would think if we had these types of weapons, they will be the target of every enemy computer in the world. This could even mean it will be turned on us. The easiest way to avoid this happening is to have a human making all the decisions not a machine. Is there a point at which artificial intelligence imposes itself on human intelligence? Maybe not quite yet but it looks like it’s coming and the day we trust artificial intelligence more than our own intelligence is going to be the day of downfall for the human race. When we create our priorities, artificial intelligence being in control never seems to make the list although many people talk about movies like Terminator and such. My feeling is most scientists and engineers don’t believe machines could ever take us over and maybe that is the problem. Let’s not forget when Google had to shut down two of its artificial intelligence programs because they were talking to each other and created their own language, which we didn’t understand. It isn’t just robots we have to worry about, it could be any intelligent machine in a room like computers or refrigerators, after all just about everything will be computerized in the near future. It could also make humans dumber, because all these machines will be doing things we used to have to decide on for ourselves. It is conceivable a lot of things will be forgotten, for example many of us may forget how to cook because our computer-controlled stoves will do everything for us. Having everything done for us is not a good thing in the long run. There is just so much harm which eventually could be done to us just by this one thing. For example, our muscles might atrophy, we may even forget how to read since our devices will all be reading to us. Humans need a certain amount of exercise and that includes not only physical exercise, but mental exercise. Eventually, we may have some sort of computer chip in our head and never have to go to school, and this will mean we will be able to access data without thinking. We will become the equivalent of some sort of receiver. It certainly won’t mean we are any smarter so I have to wonder how this will affect the things we use our brains for? Can a brain shrink from not having enough use? There are precedents for intelligence shrinking and as a matter of fact intelligence has been going down worldwide for several years now. Will we all be stupid in the future; I certainly hope not? It certainly looks like we are becoming too dependent on devices instead of using our brains in certain situations. If people want to stay human, they have to do some thinking every once in a while. Just sitting back playing computer games never moving around much never doing any problem-solving seems to be a recipe for disaster. Will we be responsible for creating some sort of sentient artificial life? It looks like we are heading down that path and to make matters even worse it is starting to look like the artificial brains these devices would have, might turn out to be lab grown human ones. I say this because the tiny brains labs have been growing seem to be turning on and it has gotten scientists very worried. If humans learn how to grow brains, grow organs and get to truly understand every part of the human body, will they become Dr. Frankensteins? What I mean is will we start to create creatures which are artificial but look human and may even act human? We may bypass robots altogether, and this might be the worst thing we could do. We can’t even agree with other humans and this has caused all types of wars, can you imagine the disagreements we might have with artificial humans?
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