Future Thinking in Machines

Artificial Intelligence is all around us, in our cellphones, cars, and now even the military. Smart houses are becoming the norm and younger generations are relying on social media or youtube for entertainment. In this day in age, more and more machines are gaining a silicon brain. Computers you can talk to, computers that protect the country, and computers that drive our cars are being developed. A constant flow of technology is always present in our everyday lives. And with all these updates, no pun intended, researchers are beginning to wonder.

..should we keep improving A.I.? If so, what will that mean for humanity?

Well, this new surge of Artificial Intelligence is not really all that new. The concept of Artificial Intelligence has been around since the 1960s when the first chatbots were invented. These experimental bots are what paved the way for conversational softwares to come. In 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, developed the first known chatbot.

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He named it Eliza, after Eliza Doolittle, the character from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. It was programmed to help patients by copying a psychotherapist and responding to their problems with rhetorical questions. It was tasked with catching key phrases in the questions and answering with a question of its own. It later became a huge success, even to the point of people developing attachments to the Eliza bot. These principals of what a ‘chat bot’ is has improved over the years and grown into some famous assistant robots we all know today.

These include Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.

These pocket-sized computers can hold conversations for as long as the user desires, and can access the entire web to find an answer to the most complex of questions. This exponential growth of AI can be a comfort to some people, but a threat to others. Justin Mullins, a writer for New Scientist Magazine argues, “The history of AI suggests that is unlikely, but after decades of faltering starts and failed promises, things are beginning to change. Finally, machines might soon start to think for themselves.” Meaning that, every improvisation made, from now on, has to be done with a level of caution.

These cautions are mainly centered around the idea of mimicking human brains in AI. The idea of robots gaining the ability to think independently has been a recurring trope in science fiction films. But instead of using their “more human” brains to serve humanity, they use it to overthrow their human counterparts. For example, “A.N.I. is what animates the androids in the HBO series ‘Westworld’—that is, until they develop A.G.I. and start making decisions on their own and posing human questions about existence, love and death” (Miller). And while this makes for a compelling plotline, in reality, scientists are nowhere near this level of Artificial Intelligence. The study of the brain is one of the largest in the scientific field. The organ is so complex that centuries of research have only unlocked less than half of its secrets. Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft had developed a particular interest in the fusing of AI and human brains. He was not motivated to study the subject until “his mother, Faye, a former elementary school teacher, became ill with Alzheimer's that Allen's brain philanthropy took shape. ‘It deepened all my motivations to want to bring forward research about the functions of the brain so that we can create treatments for the different pathologies that can develop. . . . They are horrific to watch progress,” (Cha).

While this is a just cause, people speculate that implementing AI might not be the best cure. Worry has always hung over the somewhat taboo subject of independently thinking robots. With the addition of AI to the military as of late, there has been more criticism than praise. Fear has been a constant in all forms of media. The Air Force’s use of A.I. has also sparked conflict of “full-fledged partnerships with DIUx and Silicon Valley might even lead to a full-on A.I. culture shift for the Air Force and a more versatile human-machine team—for better or worse,” (Gianetti). The worry is that the machines will be used in combat and become overly lethal. Media outlets labeling them as “autonomous killing machines,” that will make the ‘kill decision’ -- the decision to target and kill someone -- without a human in the loop.” (Barrat). But the threat of these lethal battlefield robots has not slowed the progression of adding more human features to it. Researchers are working at a faster pace than ever towards a potentially harmful form of A.I.

Even tech companies themselves are starting to research more into the ethics, and leaders are thinking more about the impact of their inventions. A recent survey of parents in the Silicon Valley area found that many had held back their own children from excessive smartphone use. Science’s greatest minds have also made numerous comments on the subject, but none framed the issue as well as when he wrote that, in the short term, “A.I.'s impact depends on who controls it; in the long term, it depends on whether it can be controlled at all. First, the short term. Hawking implicitly acknowledges that A.I. is a ‘dual use’ technology, a phrase used to describe technologies capable of great good and great harm. Nuclear fission, the science behind power plant reactors and nuclear bombs, is a ‘dual use’ technology”(Barrat). As long as humanity maintains power over AI, imminent destruction is not guaranteed. We have to maintain a perfect balance, and as Hawking so shortly put it, keep it a “dual use” technology. So to answer the question, should we keep improving AI? The answer depends on how we go about it. It is in our hands to decide whether humanity can learn to surf this new wave of Artificial Intelligence, or allow it to crush us.