Artificial Intelligence Today

-Aman Marwah

“Computers will overtake humans with AI within the next 100 years. When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals aligned with ours.”

-Stephen Hawking

Artificial Intelligence is as of now at the beta stage of development, it has controlled most of the humankind as of now through things such as smartphones, smart TV’s and/or voice-powered assistance such as Siri or Alexa. They at times tend to outsmart humans whilst humans are the ones giving commands to the machine. Machines haven’t taken over. Not yet. However, in the near future, we might have to face a crisis like iRobot, The Terminator or The Transformers. But these things are not artificial intelligence per se rather it’s just an algorithm created by a software engineer and put to use. A true artificial intelligence system is one that learns things on its own, it can constantly keep getting smarter day by day, minute by minute, it can permit itself to enhance it proficiencies by its self like a human being.

In today’s day, tech giants such Facebook, Apple, Tesla, and Google are unveiling ground-breaking updates on their software systems but unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to work out. Recently, Facebook shut down their artificial intelligence program because the chat robots started to develop their own language instead of what they were actually made to learn, the language pattern was exactly a mirror image to how humans develop speech patterns. Moreover, Google’s DeepMind learned how to walk, jump and face obstacles on its own, however, it was only a stick animation but in the next 10 year it could be a physical machine which humans won’t be able to regulate, this hasn’t stopped the public fear of the artificial intelligence capabilities. Many believe that the world is not ready for AI. In my opinion, AI is not a very revolutionary idea overall. Voice assistance is making humans so dependent that in later future, humans would be sitting in a corner of the room lacking the ability to pick up a book and read it.

Artificial intelligence has started taking over employment through job automation, it is said that the artificial intelligence keeps up with work efficiency as well works faster. Robots have been in the factory for years but now artificial intelligence can be used to drive cars, control drones, etcetera. But, this is just the tip of the iceberg. This causes taking of jobs which don’t require any critical thinking from humans.

Although, AI has many benefits but, more of risks. Benefits being; the goal of keeping AI’s impact on society beneficial inspires research in many areas, from economics and law to technical subjects such as verification, validity, security, and control. Whereas it may be little more than a negligible nuisance if your laptop crashes or gets hacked, it becomes all the more important that an AI system does what you want it to do if it controls your car, your aeroplane, your pacemaker, your automated trading system or your power grid. Another short-term challenge is preventing a devastating arms race in lethal autonomous weapons. While the risks being; AI is a virtual bot that has been made to develop like a human and have human-like characteristics, learn and adapt to the surroundings like a human but, in a much faster way. Most researchers have found that AI can’t reciprocate human emotions like love or hate and that there is no reason to expect AI to become intentionally benevolent or malevolent. But, anything could happen; just like you cannot predict human behaviour we cannot predict the behaviour of a developing machine.