Topic: Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is an area of technology that has become increasingly important in recent years, and has the potential to be a great tool for improving humanity in the future. At its base level, AI is just any computer program that does a job that is normally reserved for people. This is a broad definition, though, and there are many different subsets of AI that contain vastly different technologies. Strong AI is a term which refers to programs that aim to mimic exactly how the human brain operates, and use that logic to complete their tasks. Weak AI, on the other hand, is only concerned with getting a task done, and does not care what the logic flow of the computer program is to achieve that task. There also exists AI’s which fall in between the two definitions. These programs use human cognition as a general model for their operation, but fall short of replicating the human through process. Although these systems may follow a similar logic flow as the human brain, as discussed later, I believe their lack of emotion and comprehension separates them from human intelligence.
Some of the more famous AI systems, such as Deep Blue or Watson are all viable implementations of AI because they all follow the broad goal of AI: to do a task that a human would normally do. The question of how impressive each of these systems are, though, can certainly be up for debate. I think that the most impressive of the AI systems are the ones that use neural nets, because they are essentially learning from experience rather than being hardwired to do certain things, just like how humans learn. But no matter how advanced and impressive these programs become, the question still remains: do these programs constitute actual intelligence? One test which has been proposed as a check for human level intelligence is the turing test, which states that if you can have a conversation with an AI program which is so realistic that you can’t tell you’re talking to a computer, then the test is passed and the program is said to have human level intelligence. A rebuttal to this test is the Chinese room thought experiment, which essentially claims that although a program may be able to “converse” in Chinese, the program doesn’t really understand Chinese, it is just following a set of predetermined prompts. By this logic, a human could follow the same prompts as the computer program, and “converse” with someone in Chinese without ever knowing how to speak Chinese. I think that this is a correct way to distinguish human intelligence from artificial intelligence, and is the reason that AI will never match the level of cognition humans have. Even with advanced concepts like neural nets, AI programs still don’t contain any level of understanding or self awareness in what they are doing, they are simply just doing whichever action is weighted the best according to an algorithm, and because of this they will never be able to match human comprehension. In this same sense, I do not believe AI could ever have morality because a computer algorithm could never really understand the value of a human life. In order to do this you need emotions, you need to think compassionately instead of following a set of commands, and this is something that AI will never be able to do.
As far as fears about AI, I believe that these are largely unwarranted. Just as with any new technology, there is always initial skepticism, and the possibility for things to go wrong. But at the same time it seems that the same companies developing AI are very aware of what could go wrong, and are working diligently to keep AI safe. For this reason I am not necessarily worried about AI from a safety perspective, but am far more concerned about how AI will impact human culture. If AI continues to develop at the rate it is, many humans may find their jobs obsolete in the near future, which would mean that people would need to find new ways to make money and occupy themselves. I think if anything this is the main concern over AI, and is something which could majorly affect the sociopolitical climate of the world in the coming decades.