Artificial intelligence
Doomsday scenario or age of wonder?
SAN FRANCISCO – Artificial intelligence. Machine learning. Knowledge engineering.
Call it what you want, but AI by any name had the tech world uniquely divided in 2017, and the new year isn’t likely to bring any quick resolutions.
In case you missed it, the fiery debate over AI’s potential impact on society was encapsulated by the opinions of two bold- face Silicon Valley names.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told the National Governors Association this fall that his exposure to AI technology suggests it poses “a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg parried such doomsday talk — which would include cosmologist Stephen Hawking’s view that AI could prove “theworst event in the history of civilization” — with a video post calling such negative talk “pretty irresponsible.”
As the war of words raged, AI continued its creep into our daily lives, from the new facial recognition software in Apple’s iPhone X to the increasingly savvy responses from digital assistants Siri, Alexa and Cortana.
With the amount of often personal information fed by consumers into cloud- based brains compounding exponentially, companies such as Facebook and Google are poised to have unprecedented insights into, and leverage over, our lives. So which is it— are we heading into a glorious tech- enabled future where many menial tasks will be handled by savant machines, or one where the robots will have taken over for us woefully underpowered humans?
USA TODAY reached out to a number of artificial intelligence stakeholders to get their view on AI, friend or foe.
The conclusion: Excitement over AI’s potentially positive impacts seems, for now, adequately tempered by an acknowledgement that scientists need to stay vigilant about how such technology is developed, to ensure bias is eliminated and control is retained.
AI watchdog groups on the rise
“Innovation has generally liberated humans to be more productive,” says Rep. John Delaney, D-Md. Last fall, along with colleague Pete Olson, R-Texas, Delaney launched the AI Caucus, whose mission is to inform policymakers about the technological, economic and social impacts of AI.
Delaney says there are “a million conversations that can happen between now and the Terminator arriving,” referring to the film in which machines attempt to exterminate humans.
There are a growing number of groups being formed to try to ensure that dismal future never comes to pass.
These include AI Now, which is led by New York University researcher Kate Crawford, who last year warned attendees at SXSW of the possible rise of fascist AI. There’s also Open AI, a Musk- backed research outfit, and the Partnership on AI, whose members include Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft, though notably not Apple.
Woz: From AI skeptic to fan
Apple co- founder Steve Wozniak initially found himself in the AI- wary camp. He, like Musk and Hawking, was concerned that machines with human- like consciousness could eventually pose a risk to homo sapiens. But then he changed his thinking, based largely on the notion that humans still remain perplexed by howthe brainworks its magic, which in turn means that it would be difficult for scientists to create machines that can think like us.