We are all quite aware that technology is constantly being improved around us.
If we compare the technology that is available to consumers today with that which was available ten or twenty years ago, we really can appreciate how rapidly our technology is improving, and how much more intelligent we are making computers and systems all around us.
But is this always a good thing?
The products that are designed and sold in our world today are created with the intention of making our lives easier. We not only benefit from the time that we save from having a creation perform a task for us, but it is very likely that the purpose-built creation performs the task better too.
Younger generations have a fountain of education at their fingertips. Information on pretty much anything is readily available on the internet - gone are the days of looking through old library books to gather information.
We reached a point in recent years where we can teach computers to learn and become more intelligent.
We are living in an age of self-driving cars, voice recognition, media players that we can have a conversation with and 3D printers!
ScienceNature released this short video on their Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/ScienceNaturePage/videos/1133328986799358/
A popular concern about the advances of artificial intelligence is that the computer will develop a superior level of intellect to humans. If this happens, then it is feared that there is the opportunity for the computers to dominate our existence.
The Independent released the publication below 4 days ago regarding an experiment performed by Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Research Division. The experiment was abandoned because the programmes were not doing what they were required to do and instead they communicated to each other in a language that only they understood before successfully performing the task in hand.
Understandably there are concerns that these programmes could over-power us, not in a typical movie script scenario with robots trying to kill us, but if we keep creating machines and programmes that perform tasks more competently than we do, then we may be at risk of the artificial intelligence's goals becoming misaligned with our own. When it has been argued that a machine can not have goals, an argument found against this highlights that a heat-seeking missile is a machine and has a goal.
We have made films about AI for decades and as time goes on and life evolves, we are seeing an increase in the number of these predictions and ideas becoming a reality.
"Everything we love about civilization is a product of intelligence, so amplifying our human intelligence with artificial intelligence has the potential of helping civilization flourish like never before – as long as we manage to keep the technology beneficial.“
- Max Tegmark, President of the Future of Life Institute
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