ONE of the favorite themes in many of the most popular science fiction films about the future like Space Odyssey 2001, Star Trek, Matrix, TRON or Terminator has been about artificial intelligence. It’s all about how machines will eventually become better than humans, and will not be contended to be ruled by us, but will revolt, and rule the humans.
For so long, we’ve known that computers always did better than humans in terms of memorizing, or in terms of computing/number crunching alone. Computers can do a lot of things now, like trade stocks, or manage traffic and elevators or even our inventory. But we always say it will be a long time before machines can reason, or have deductive powers. For so long, it was even hard for computers to understand human writing or conversation.
Of course, we pretend that it will never happen, but there has been so much development in computing power that well-known personalities--the likes of Bill Gates and Elon Musk--are starting to sound the alarm.
Computers continue to be more powerful that Microsoft, Google and Apple are now touting that computers or smartphones connected to artificial personalities like Siri or Cortana can now converse with people like they were human. There are computers that can read handwriting, recognize art, create and arrange music, and can understand pictures or even recognize faces. We also read about how computers are beating us in the game of chess (IBM’s Deep Blue beat World chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997), and Jeopardy, but it is even more than that. Recently, computers are now beating us in the Chinese name of Go, which they say was infinitely more complex than chess, and computers could not do. The program AlphaGo, which was designed by Google’s artificial intelligence arm DeepMind, has managed to beat European champion Fan Hui for the first time.
The spectre also of driverless cars is becoming more and more real. In as few as 10 years, we will see most cars won’t need a driver, and what’s more, it would even be safer, as the car would most likely not commit many of the errors a human makes. Futurists now predict a huge drop in people dying in car accidents as cars start to drive themselves. This was probably something most futurists missed. And now with better insight, I always tell my friends, how come in the future when the technology is so advanced, we still need humans to drive spaceships and cars, and also to fire guns (most often very inaccurately)?
Recently, famous tech personality Elon Musk tweeted that artificial intelligence can potentially harm the human race more than nuclear bombs. I guess just like most things, the development of technology can be good and bad, and we always have to be vigilant about it.
(wilson@ngkhai.com)