"Will Artificial intelligence brighten our future as a planet, or threaten it?"

A thread on answers to that question:-

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Intro:- Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rather unique innovation. It is drastically different in the way that it has ability to think, reason, and solve problems. The efforts now is towards making general AI which mimics human's critical thinking capability.

It is expected that AIs will affect almost everything connected to human life e.g. ethics, privacy, security, employment, economy, healthcare etc.

Creating intelligent machines is not without concerns or ethical issues when it comes to how safe they will be, and how to ensure that they will not harm humans and other morally relevant creatures.

Moreover, As AI progress gets accelerated, more robots and autonomous systems will be created and replace the
manual labor.

In contrast, AI has its advantages too. It has many applications that would lead humanity towards making this planet a better place to live.

In the following tweets, I will be analysing the pros and cons of AI, alongside what it actually is and how it works!

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#robots

The term of AI was first coined in 1956 by an American computer scientist, also called Father of AI, John McCarthy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
@MIT

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This new field of study emphasises the creation of intelligent machines in a way that mimics human brain intelligence, a computer mind that can think and act humanly and rationally.

AI is actually a branch of computer science with the contributions from other scientific disciplines such as Biology, Psychology, Linguistics, Mathematics, and Engineering. The main motivation of AI is to develop computer functions correlated with human intelligence!

Btw,fun fact,an Artificial intelligence powered robot is scheduled to take the IMO exam (International Mathematical Olympiad) to test how critically a robot can think compared to humans.

This will occur in IMO 2021 (in Washington DC). Hopefully, I will be there to watch it!

Anyway, so generally, AI is categorised in two sectors, narrow (weak) AI and general (strong) AI. Narrow AI attempts to perform only one task. Narrow AI systems are already part of systems such as Apple Siri, Facebook recommendations, in our cars, our homes etc.

The challenge now is to create a general AI system that attempts to perform the full range of human cognitive abilities such as human language,object recognition, attention etc. A system that can learn and develop itself and become more intelligent with observing more data.

According to Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering, AI will reach human intelligence by 2029, and by 2045 AI comes into its own and become the most intelligent species on the planet.

This has both positives and negatives which I will talk about.

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We have many examples for such intelligent machines showing better performance than human in some specific tasks.

For eg, in 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue beat @Kasparov63 at chess, becoming the first computer to defeat a human world champion! The GOAT of Chess arguably!

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However, what the developments of AI bring to our modern day human class are more intimidations! Some researchers and developers think that AI could grow extremely strong, and it would become problematic for humans to control.

AI systems are developed by introducing them into human intelligence , such as capacity for logic, self-awareness,emotional knowledge,creativity, and problem-solving.

The self - optimising AI systems can become super-intelligent and outperform human intelligence.

Stephen Hawking himself believed that humankind is in danger of self- destruction due to AI.

In his interview with WIRED Hawking said, “A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.”

Michael Vassar, an AI expert and the chief science officer of MetaMed Research, believes that artificial super-intelligence will annihilate humanity if we do not approach AI with significant caution.

In a video posted by Big Think, he states that, “If greater-than-human artificial general intelligence is invented without due caution, it is all but certain that the human species will be extinct in very short order”

This big threat aside, another risk of AI is on our jobs in the future as it substitutes for human roles. AI systems have already begun replacing the humankind in few industries.

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In a widely investigated research based on statistics,Carl Benedikt and Michael Osborne estimated that about 47 percent of employees in the US are at risk of losing their careers in twenty-first century because of AI.

"First world" countries would be the quickest affected by AI.

Here’s some data which talks about % of employees in each respective country who will be effected by automation:-

No Data on Bangladesh here!

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Mckinsey has conducted a study to investigate the number of automatable activities in large countries by population. Globally speaking, they think that 1.1 billion employees equivalent to $15.8 trillion in wages are technically automatable activities.

Imagine that!

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This is actually a big shift of income from labor to capital and raises high inequality in many countries. The data above again talks in detail about that in terms of countries which will be the most affected by automation!

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Now, onto the issues of ethics and conscience.

The ethical impact of AI on the social inequality is extremely worrying. Think about this gap when all revenues go to fewer people once companies stop relying on the human workforce...

Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist and former healthcare adviser to Barack Obama, says “If you look at what gives people meaning in their lives, it’s three things: meaningful relationships, passionate interests, and meaningful work.”

He also adds that “Meaningful work is a very important element of someone’s identity.”

He says that the risk of suicide, substance abuse and depression will increase when the industries replace human by robots.

Many researchers think that the biggest challenge facing AI is an ethical one, including privacy concerns!

Nick Bostrom, a Swedish born Philosopher, says, “Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make."

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The amount of details an AI database can store is mind-boggling to say the least!

That's how all social media handles generate your recommendations and ads btw!

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Another big ethical question is responsibility and assignment of blame. For example, many ethical issues arise for self-driving vehicles. Questions like; who has to be blamed for an accident?

Are homosapiens ready to trust a remote software? These are questions and answer!

However, not everything is "dangerous and unethical" in the development of Artificial intelligence.

Some positive atributes of AI below:-

It is necessary to talk about the benefits that AIs bring to human society. An AI system that is able to transform massive amount of complex and ambiguous data into insight could potentially disclose long-held secrets and help humans to solve the world’s most lasting problems!

AI systems have been deployed in a range of applications.

When we use our credit cards to buy goods, it is AI that decides whether this transaction has to be approved or not. The GPS system is based on an AI algorithm to find the best route to the destination entered by users!

The trends for the future AI are to simulate human intelligence in order to be able to solve problems and make decisions.

An AI robot can be made to fulfil its tasks tirelessly and without being affected by emotions.....

In in all, there's both pros and cons of AI for our planet.

Artificial Intelligence comprises a unique set of technologies that are quite different from other inventions that humanity has ever developed. It is expected that it will change the world forever!

When it comes to answering the question whether it will brighten or threaten our future, I would say that is a double-sided question. It actually depends on how it will be introduced.

Let's wait and see what the world and AI has in store for us!

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To those who made it this far, thank you for reading this thread.

I hope you learned something new or had something to take away from it.

Have a great evening and plz do share this thread if you like it!