AI And The Robot Apocalypse
What is AI?
AI is the new electricity which I'll define as making machines capable of doing human like tasks. AI is the new trend and of course every field now depends on AI applications to improve it's market value and quality. We will shorty discuss the two main types of AI, that is, Narrow AI and General AI.
Narrow AI
Narrow AI is functioning today. We take a task, only one task and design it's working algorithms and integrate all those neural networks into our machine. Hence the machine becomes capable of performing that one task. Self driving car and Google assistant are it's very popular examples.
But our topic of discussion was AI and the ROBOT APOCALYPSE right? So let's jump right into General AI which is just a hypothesis and none of it's practical examples have yet been experimented.
General AI
General AI is a system capable of doing multiple tasks simultaneously just like us humans do. We think, we breathe, perform, act, feel and all this stuff. General AI is a great idea and scientists and programmers are currently working on it but, it's not very soon when we see a machine with general AI programs integrated in it. This blog covers how near or far will general AI be functioning approximately. Robot apocalypse is directly related to this. And we fear it when it's not even coming to us. Why? The answer to this "why" is simple. Our movies show us the times when this world will be overtaken by robots if we continued to progress in AI, let me name a handful of them and probably you've also seen some of them.
Automata, Terminator Salvation, Uncanny, The Manual and many more. We fear because this is what they portray to us. But let's go deeper and see if it's really a myth or only a statistical blog is going to decide the summary of our whole topic.
Neural networks, Algorithms and General AI
General AI is a difficult reach when there are hundreds of problems that are still unsolvable in Narrow AI. Until we conquer those, we can't jump to General AI.
Challenges that AI is facing
In narrow AI, problems like biasing, computer vision, automated reasoning and many more appear and AI specialists have to deal with it.
Also data is the core root of any AI machine, corrupt data can make the machine do unwanted tasks. In a single tasked system, suppose self driving cars, we need tons of data to create it's algorithms and neural networks. We need images from around the world to make our system work best but when you're dealing with such huge amount of data, you have to also deal with it's corruptness, data biasing and how the computer is understanding the information provided to it. That's why, Narrow AI machining is a time taking but worthy task and it takes a lot of effort to actually come up with a system that works super efficiently. We see how there are only a handful applications of AI in the world right now. But they are all single tasked. Let's jump straight into the next thought, if narrow AI is still struggling, how far will general AI be? This question sometimes makes me sad because what I want is technological upraising with a linear graph and of course that's a dream.
Robot apocalypse. A myth?
The ones who argue that it ain't a myth states that Intelligence is limitless, hence siding the speed of expansion of AI, we should fear the day when intelligence will cross it's limits to overcome those who used to wore the crown of intelligence. But I'll argue here that intelligence is not limitless. Rather it is different. We program our intelligence into our self created machines, the machine will perform it's tasks in an attractive way, but that doesn't mean that the machine is more intelligent than us. The machine is just different than us. Us humans don't like differences right. We don't even accept difference of opinions and people from different races and religions. But this time you have to accept this. The robot got no more intelligence. It just performs in a new way.
One thing that I've seen many times on the internet regarding this topic is the Ladder of intelligence. And they prove it very well by the Darwinian theory of evolution. I'll just sum up the theme of the proof, that is, since Darwin proposed that evolution was the algorithm that made us today what we are today. Darwinian theory has stages in it and we can number them or at least can visualize the stages of change.
But intelligence got no visualization. Also intelligence can not be understood in a manner that monkey has 1 intelligence and humans got an intelligence of 2 so the aunts got it 10. We can't give it stages, and hence we got the authorization to control it. Control it in the systems that we make.
It strongly supports this statement:
A programmer can't program a program that is smarter than the programmer itself(rather it is different).
Automation and Machines
Let’s assume we are in 2090 and General AI is everywhere now. It means, the robot apocalypse is near.
But stop for a second and tell yourself this that machines do what they are made to do. They don't have emotions, and they don't have the cruel human idea of subjugation to take over all the power.
Robots don't wish, they don't implement things on their own until there are no safeguards in AI machines to stop the idea of subjugation in their brains. Hence it seems like if AGI became a common trend at any time in human history, then we will have a need of maintaining an Intelligence Cop Force too, whose tasks will be to keep a check on AI innovations taking place around the globe and ensure safeguards in it.
Robots and Humans
Since we see Chatbots in developed nations, and cool machines in Japan who are although 10 years ahead of our world, will these robots(not totally AGI integrated) take over all the jobs from humans. Well this looks like the first step towards the apocalypse!
Negating the statement given above, Pew Research Center gave a report that 52% of experts believe that the number of jobs AI will displace will be lesser than the number of new jobs that'll be introduced due to AI itself.
Also, World Economic Forum stated a report that by 2022, 58 million more jobs will be generated by AI as compared to the number of jobs that they will displace.
This is a different topic that what kind of jobs would probably be displaced by AI and what jobs will be created. But even if your occupation is the one which is threatened by AI, don't worry. AI needs experienced experts from every field, to maintain your job with the innovations of AI is simple. Just keep yourself updated with AI and take a few courses on how you can serve your company with AI. You don't need to be a computer expert or programmer to do all this. All you need is how to connect your work with AI, and you will be the most demanded person in your niche. Hence if you mold yourself with the technologies that are rising day by day, you are a hero.
Concluding the article, I'll say that AGI applications are hypothetical till now. So are the AGI robots. Hence the robot apocalypse is just a myth and what you need now is a cup of coffee and a good book to sit and relax and not to worry about the things that are not going to happen lately.
