“The development of full artificial intelligence spells the end of Human Race”
– Stephen Hawking
If you’ve seen movies like ‘I, Robot’ or ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’, you can imagine where AI is headed. You know that AI is just not a destruction fuelled humanoid on a mission to make humans their slaves but can be self-driving car or a deep neural network-enabled medical detector or your factory machine or your stock market investor or your health monitor.
The AI pioneers are divided about the benefits of their creation. Let us look at the Flip Side of Artificial Intelligence in spheres that affect you.
Self-driving Cars: Danger on wheels? Self-driving cars are supposed to be intelligent. Their brain – embeded software – gives them this aura. And what if this software crashes mid drive? Restart or reinstall? Several stringent safety guidelines are already in place and self-driving experiments have successfully implemented them. But since Artificial Intelligence is just that, ‘Artificial’, I would certainly prefer to be driven by Homo Sapien-controlled Cognitive Intelligence or simply put, by humans.
Job Automation: One may never again lose a job to poor economic policies, inefficient governments, mismanaged companies, natural disasters, but to Artificial Intelligence-powered software tools. With deep learning, machine learning and neural networks solving business problems, factory workers, business analysts, telemarketers, clerks, and receptionists are at high risks of losing their jobs in the next few years.
Data Protection: Your online data may not be safe! Data breach of so called ‘highly protected’ systems is happening all the time. The biggest pitfall in the advancement of AI is that anybody can modify machine learning to achieve one's goals. The malwares are programmed to learn and self -evolve. They learn from a failed attempt to identify the weaker nodes for the next attack. And intelligent anti-virus software work after the damage is done.
Stock Market Investing: Remember 2010 stock crash? Trillions of dollars of investor money went down the drain in a few minutes thanks to Artificial Intelligence at work. Experts opine that the crash happened due to (a) increase in tech-led automatic trading, technically called Algorithmic Trading (AT) and (b) interaction between such algorithms. AT’s are here to stay and expect history to repeat itself.
Conclusion:
The true reflection of AI’s flip side is that even its developers are not fully able to understand the decisions an intelligent system takes. They are unable to point a finger at a control structure while analysing why the system takes the decision it takes. Is this the grey area that we are going to go into the future with? Elon Musk goes to the extent of saying “If AI systems learn and grow at this rate, they would end up overthrowing humans and take control of governments and the judiciary systems”.
Of course, we trust the ‘Human Intelligence’ to ensure ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is shown its right place, power and who the real boss is. Rest assured, folks.
