AI Will NOT Take Over The World And Drive Humanity To Extinction–Here’s Why – Tech Times

RJ Pierce, Tech Times 17 February 2022, 07:02 am

AI has been the subject of countless popular TV shows and movies over the years-just not in a relatively positive way. In these shows, it always seems like artificial intelligence will decide to completely wipe out humanity and civilization from existence. It's a bleak "prediction," but does it actually have any basis in reality?

(Photo : Photo credit should read BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Image)An AI robot with a humanistic face, entitled Alter 3: Offloaded Agency, is pictured during a photocall to promote the forthcoming exhibition entitled "AI: More than Human", at the Barbican Centre in London on May 15, 2019. - Managing the health of the planet, fighting against discrimination, innovating in the arts: the fields in which artificial intelligence (AI) can help humanity are innumerable.

According to several scientists, the feared dangers of AI aren't much of an existential threat to humanity as a whole. And that depends on one thing: whether it is even possible for us to create artificial intelligence way smarter than we are, writes ScienceAlert.

The AI that exists right now is pretty powerful in its own right. It is what's being used for things like self-driving cars, facial recognition software, and even Google recommendations. But the thing with current-gen AI is that it's considered "narrow" or "weak."

While this kind of artificial intelligence is already quite good, they're often only capable of doing one thing exceptionally, according to LabRoots. If you try to make them do something else while doing something they're good at, these AIs will fail because they lack the necessary data to perform it.

(Photo : geralt from Pixabay)

Current-generation artificial intelligence still falls short of tasks that will always require abilities that only humans possess, writes Forbes. For instance, experienced surgeons are still the best choice for performing surgeries, with their fine motor skills and skill at perceiving individual situations.

You also can't use an AI to replace HR professionals, because the job will require a deep, intrinsic understanding of human reactions that a machine just doesn't have, no matter how "advanced" it might be. It is these kinds of situations where combining machine and human intelligence still reigns supreme. The human element provides the machine with the necessary context, while the latter is put to work crunching numbers and giving recommendations.

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In an article by The Conversation, they put this specific argument forward. A machine can always "learn" if it is fed data about the task it's meant to achieve. Sure, it can process information much faster than a human can (and perhaps even come up with solutions no person can ever think of), but it doesn't make the machine smarter than a human at all.

Here's one situation where machine learning is still way behind human learning. Take a toddler, for instance. That child can learn how to do a specific task within seconds just by watching somebody do it. A machine can only learn something if it is fed an extremely massive amount of data, which it uses when performing trial-and-error.

At the end of the day, it still falls on the human element of the issue. You should be far more scared of how humans use artificial intelligence, and not the AI itself. This is considering the technology's capability to draw conclusions from whatever data is being fed to it and how it can only focus on one task at a time.

(Photo : Getty Images )

In other words, an AI trained to do something good, like identifying climate change tipping points, is not dangerous at all. But a machine which is trained in something bad, like warfare, can be extremely perilous. So don't be scared of robots taking over the world, because people-not the perceived dangers of AI-will still be the most critical aspect of civilization's downfall.

Related Article: 'Free Guy' Artificial Intelligence: Can Tech Like This Actually Exist?

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Written by RJ Pierce

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AI Will NOT Take Over The World And Drive Humanity To Extinction--Here's Why - Tech Times