Fears of #AI

There are two sides to everything. When there is fire, there is water. When there is life, there is death. When there is white, there is black. When there is positive, there is negative. From ages, mankind has been divided while taking sides. There are supporters of peace and there are supporters of war to restore the order. There are people who love meats and non-vegetarian foods and then there are pure vegans. And many more such divisions and splits build the equilibrium in the world. In Chinese philosophy, this is well depicted with Yin – Yang.

The new technological revolution triggered with advent of affordable Artificial intelligence has left the world again split wide open. With more technological adoption, there are more advancements. This is Yin. The Yang to is the growing threat to privacy and cyber security.

Data mounted machines with ability to think themselves provide significant edge to the make the smart animal called human beings to do smarter things. The mundane shall be taken care of by these intelligent machines that learn, adopt and execute on their own to first do these mundane tasks and then quickly move to the more advanced ones. The advanced tasks make machines capable of doing more things smartly. Consequently, they become more useful and enable human beings do more smarter things.

So far so good.

What if the fundamental assumption that the humans are smarter and can do smarter things turns to be untrue. Numerous studies highlight that humans are perhaps becoming dumber and more dependent on the machines. The smart human being is not doing the smart thing but is becoming lazy. So does this growing smartness of these machines, opens human beings to the risk of being dominated by the machines? Are we actually going to see a world where Terminators shall roam around and machines will decide what human beings will do.

These scenarios have divided the world and the smartest of people in the world are arguing on it. Intelligence and smartness of people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg is beyond debate.

Debate worthy is the positions they have taken. While Mark Zuckerberg believes that machines will make lives easier, even though his own product Facebook struggles to wriggle out of the fake news problem. He clearly sees the value in machines dominating smooth human interactions. He believes that AI can trans form the world for better. Perhaps he needs to first put some of his solutions on to Whatsapp – to tackle with fast flowing fake news problem.

Check out his views on AI in the FB Live below:

 https://www.facebook.com/zuck/videos/10103911836230631/

The contrary view has been taken by Elon Musk, who thinks that the world may not be such a beautiful place after AI comes full throttle in the forefront. He fears that machines led world may be more susceptible to creating worldwide disruptions and that it would not be a better place to live.

The video below further emphasizes Elon’s stand that we are looking at a doom’s day scenario if there is no regulation on AI.

The contrarian views of the two Technopreneurs have reached to the limit of public spat between the two with Elon accusing Mark of not having enough understanding of AI.

Its an unhealthy discussion but it surely opens new view points and thoughts for probable pitfalls of AI.

Here is the link to the full public fight.

Public Spat between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg

I am running a small Twitter poll to assess how people think about the doomsday scenario. Please participate.

What are you worried about with #AI going mainstream?

— Amitesh Tyagi (@amiteshtweets) July 26, 2017