Who’s afraid of smart machines?
In April 2017, Amazon released a conversational interface in Alexa, which has found uses including the setting up of smart homes.
Daily TribuneIn April 2017, Amazon released a conversational interface in Alexa, which has found uses including the setting up of smart homes.
When movie lovers first watched Terminator which stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, everybody was amazed at the idea of machines developing intelligence and later on taking over.
The thought then was that the fictional world of sentient automatons remains far off and the possibility of a self-replicating army of machines is in the realm of dreams.
Then came the huge leap in artificial intelligence followed by the race among countries to get ahead in emerging technologies that would lead to the replication of humans and maybe later on the creation of super robots.
Thus, the danger becomes nearer and the age of the machines is now a clear and present danger. At the moment, AI presents enormous possibilities that both benefit and threaten mankind.
In terms of creating smart weapons, the synthetic brain power should lessen collateral damage among civilians and even the foot soldiers as machines take over the role of combatants in a limited war.
Moreover, most of the daily implements and technologies originated from the necessities during conflicts such as the Internet, mobile phones and even high-powered computers.
The first mass use of AI was the Smarterchild in AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger, which paved the way for Siri which was introduced as a feature of the iPhone4 S.
Siri was named after SRI International, a research institute funded by, among others, the United States Department of Defense.
In April 2017, Amazon released a conversational interface in Alexa, which has found uses including the setting up of smart homes.
Then came generative AI or GenAI which is more commonly associated with ChatGPT that is expected to overhaul the labor environment as it is viewed as assisting workers but also presents the threat of replacing them as it cuts across domains of knowledge.
As AI develops further, the benefits from the enhancement of lives that it brings are becoming clear to far outweigh the fear of the novel technology causing the demise of the human race.
The vision of smart machines in futuristic movies is indeed frightening but it should not stop the advancement of AI which promises a world beyond all imagination.
Machines turning against humans remains at best the ingredient of science fiction stories.
