AI vs Humans or AI with Humans
That’s your Mr. Ultron of Marvel Cinematic Universe born to finish the age of humanity.
Box Office Collection: $1.403 billion
And that is Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger as an Artificial Intelligence imbued robot in Terminator movie Franchise all set to wreak havoc upon humans.
Box Office Collection: $78.3 million
Then this gentleman of The Matrix needs no introduction.
Box Office Collection: $466.6 million
Three big movies. Three big stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, RDJ, and Keanu reeves. Three big budgets: $6.4 million, 495.2 million, and $63 million.
But one common Villain: AI
And not just these three movies, almost all the movies that deal with AI show it as an antagonist in one way or the other.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic — Arthur C. Clarke
Maybe that's what’s happening. The way people of the past treated science as witchcraft and magic and sentenced whoever “practiced” it with punishments ranging from stone-pelting to death, the same way we are unnecessarily demonizing AI without exploring it completely.
Don’t Forget the Past. Learn from It.
If there is any weightage to the above quote then before reaching any conclusion about AI’s “motives” let's look at some of the many benefits of AI.
Artificial intelligence with Humans
Most people think that AI is competing against humans. They argue that It's dangerous to humans and also it's here to snatch their livelihood. They have a picture in their mind of robots ruling over humanity in the year 2050 or robots doing standard industry work while humans are starving as they are unemployed. Clearly, a wild dystopian idea cultivated by the movies and some anti-AI “thinkers”.
Similar arguments were given when electricity and heavy machines like bulldozers were invented. People feared that electricity will kill humans/cattle and that machines like bulldozers will strip them of their livelihood.
Well as it turned out, without taking any due credit from our beloved Bulldozers and heavy machinery, electricity is by far one of the most important discoveries that the human race has done to date.
In contrast to what anti-AI people think, AI is here to make tasks easier for humans and also safe. Examples are pothole/sinkhole cleaning, sewer cleaning, mine examining, and underwater probes.
At present, the best-performing AI systems are the ones that are utilizing both humans and AI and making them work shoulder to shoulder. For example, In healthcare AI is predicting if a patient has benign cancer or not in some scan reports, and then the doctor confirms the same. Thus reducing overhead on the doctor as well as reducing the chances of failure by adding 2 layers of fails safe mechanism.
Not all AIs are Ultron, some are Jarvis too. A little Marvel reference. For those who don't know about them then here is a brief: Jarvis was a good AI and Ultron was bad. Jarvis defeated Ultron with the help of Avengers 😃
There are certain areas still in our world, for example, in Egypt, that are still filled with land mines, and removing them is a humongous as well as a dangerous task for humans. Following findings of a survey about land mines shows the seriousness of the situation:
- It is estimated that there are 110 million land mines in the ground right now. An equal amount is in stockpiles waiting to be planted or destroyed.
- Mines cost between $3 and $30, but the cost of removing them is $300 to $1000.
- The cost of removing all existing mines would be $50- to $100-billion.
Here is a place where AI can be leveraged to its full extent. Mine removal could be dangerous for humans but not for AI. An AI-based robot when working side by side with humans can detect mines with zero loss of life.
We have all heard about the Chernobyl and also about the magnitude of the disaster it faced in 1986. Hundreds of people died due to harmful radiation. Some died at the time of the blast, some others while trying to stop the reactor manually, and a lot more in the years to come due to dangerous radiations.
Well, think of a scenario where we had remote-controlled AI robots whom we could have sent instead of humans to do the necessary fix. It would have saved the lives of many.
We don't have robots this smart currently but we can have them in the future.
Now here is something to ponder over: If such smart robots are invented then for sure there would be someone, of course, a human, somewhat devious who would try to use these robots for war and other terrorist activities. So see it's not the AI imbued robots who will be doing harm, it's the humans who will be doing harm to themselves.
Nuclear Reaction was discovered to provide unlimited clean energy to humanity but clearly, the actual usage of the same is far far away from what was actually envisioned by the scientists who made the discovery.
Judging and going by the past trends, as with guns, knives, and nuclear weapons, it will never be AI vs humans but it will always be human with AI vs human with or without AI.
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