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Antoine Tardif, Futurist who is passionate about the future of AI and robotics insist, When discussing Artificial Intelligence (AI), a common debate is whether AI is an existential threat.
Is AI an Existential Threat?
Photo: Unite.AI
The answer requires understanding the technology behind Machine Learning (ML), and recognizing that humans have the tendency to anthropomorphize. We will explore two different types of AI, Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) which is available now and is cause for concern, and the threat which is most commonly associated with apocalyptic renditions of AI which is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Artificial Narrow Intelligence Threats
To understand what ANI is you simply need to understand that every single AI application that is currently available is a form of ANI. These are fields of AI which have a narrow field of specialty, for example autonomous vehicles use AI which is designed with the sole purpose of moving a vehicle from point A to B...
Professor Nick Bostrom in the Paperclip Maximizer argument has argued that a misconfigured AGI if instructed to produce paperclips would simply consume all of earths resources to produce these paperclips. While this seems a little far fetched, a more pragmatic viewpoint is that an AGI could be controlled by a rogue state or a corporation with poor ethics. This entity could train the AGI to maximize profits, and in this case with poor programming and zero remorse it could choose to bankrupt competitors, destroy supply chains, hack the stock market, liquidate bank accounts, or attack political opponents...
Summary
There are many challenges to AI, fortunately, we still have many years to collectively figure out the future path that we want AGI to take. We should in the short-term focus on creating a diverse AI workforce, that includes as many women as men, and as many ethnic groups with diverse points of view as possible.
We should also create whistleblower protections for researchers that are working on AI, and we should pass laws and regulations which prevent widespread abuse of state or company-wide surveillance. Humans have a once in a lifetime opportunity to improve the human condition with the assistance of AI, we just need to ensure that we carefully create a societal framework that best enables the positives, while mitigating the negatives which include existential threats.
Source: Unite.AI
