WILL AI OUTSMART US?

"Computers will overtake humans with AI within next 100 years; when that happens we need to make sure the computers have same goals aligned as our"- Stephen Hawking

Intelligence is central to what it means to be human. Everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence. At some point during our 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, some beautiful things happened. The information processing got so intelligent that life forms became conscious. 

It's clearly possible to for something to acquire higher intelligence than its ancestors; humans evolved to be smarter than their ape-like ancestors.  If computers continue to obey Moor's Law; i.e., doubling their speed and memory capacity every eighteen months, the result is that computers are likely to overtake human intelligence at some point after 100 years.

For a past few years AI has been focused on the problems surrounding the society and constructing intelligent agents or systems that perceives and acts accordingly as a solution. In this context, intelligence is related to statistical and economic notions of rationality. AI has yielded remarkable success like speech recognition, computer vision, autonomous vehicles, chatbots and much more. It's economical to an extent that even small improvements are worth large sums of money. Moreover, the potential benefits are huge; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide.

Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. But unfortunately, it might also be the last. Though the primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have proved very useful, scientists fear the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans. The concern is that AI would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate. And humans, who are limited by slow biological evolutions, couldn't compete and would be superseded. 

"The short term impacts of AI depends on who controls it, whereas the long term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all"

In the past Elon Musk has warned that superhuman artificial intelligence is capable of providing incalculable benefits, but if deployed incautiously will have adverse effect on the human race. Fortunately, Elon Musk with technology pioneers and AI experts signed an open letter on artificial intelligence, calling for serious research into its impact on society. AI researchers are seriously thinking about these concerns and ethical issues.

Intelligence is characterized as the ability to adapt to change. We must not fear the change and instead make it work to our advantage. We need to take learning beyond a theoretical discussion of how AI should be and to make sure we plan how it can be. "Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it, Let's make sure that wisdom wins."

- Prateeksha Jha