Artificial intelligence.

Here is the question of the day:

How about artificial intelligence? And its progressions, how it is now beginning to be integrated through society? How far it will proceed? Should there be limits?

My thoughts:

Artificial intelligence is a blessing and a curse at the same time. Society today has placed the burden of progress on the shoulders of machines. Mankind has begun to assume the future rather than to except that it is fate, or destiny or maybe even just a series of random events strung together by chance. We have begun to give brains to machines that force conclusions to be drawn based on a series of equations and compiled data. A perfect example of a problem caused by this comes from the movie I, Robot.  There is a scene where Will Smith recalls an auto accident he had where he almost lost his life. He was saved at the last minute by a robot. This robot calculated Smith’s odds of survival to be greater than that of the young child that was trapped in the car beneath him. Any living person would have taken the chance on the child. Instead what was right was replaced by the mathematical chalk horse.  There are other questions raised by that particular movie, but we will not get into that at this time.

So let’s look at what A.I. is. Some of the weak methods are generate-and-test (a sequence of candidates is generated, each being tested for solutionhood); hill climbing (a measure of progress is used to guide each step); means-ends analysis (the difference between the desired situation and the present one is used to select the next step); impasse resolution (the inability to take the desired next step leads to a sub goal of making the step feasible); planning by abstraction (the task is simplified, solved, and the solution used as a guide); and matching (the present situation is represented as a schema to be mapped into the desired situation by putting the two in correspondence). So after all that data is processed this machine will be able to calculate the best way to climb. Much the same way humans use trial and error to grow.

So where does this lead:

There can be many outcomes as far artificial intelligence is concerned, but we have to limit it’s use. We need to make sure that humanity stays a dominant human trait and that we never allow ourselves to get to the point where a machine will make decisions for us. Would you want  a machine deciding whether or not to pull the plug on a loved one? Or would you want a machine determining if it would be prudent to bomb a country because of the possibility of war?

Now due to an advanced case of ADHD I forgot what I was thinking, so I am going to cut out here. Thanks.

~DK