Artificial Intelligence: Something to be Feared?
Artificial Intelligence is something that has begun to spring into action and slowly take over our lives one step at a time. From Siri to great amounts of American citizens being laid off because of a machine having a higher success rate than the person.
But is Artificial Intelligence really something to be feared? Are they really smarter than us? Really, it shouldn’t be. Like all computers, they are the dumbest things in the world. They do nothing unless told to by a human or object activating it. Though, it closes some jobs where AI will flourish, like manufacturing: where the same job is repeated over and over. But it cannot do something different or a job that requires empathy like teaching or hospitality.
The definition of Artificial intelligence from the Webster dictionary is a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers. Artificial intelligence is a technological advantage that will make life easier and should be welcomed into society so that the people can take full advantage of what it will bring to us. Artificial Intelligence is something that is quickly advancing and should be welcomed so people can take advantage of what it brings to us. By doing this, our everyday lives will be easier and the technology will advance sooner. “While Moore’s Law implies technology doubles every two years, the reality is humans are notoriously slow at adopting it” (Eldridge).
The main reason people are adopting artificial intelligence at a very slow rate, even slower than Moore’s law says is because the fear built behind it. From the Hollywood film, Terminator to highly recommended books like Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat. If this fear was removed then people would be able to adopt it sooner. “Artificial Intelligence in industry, experts are predicting, will change everything about the way people produce, manufacture and deliver” (Marr). It is only logical that Artificial Intelligence will change our daily lives.
And this will make it for the better. A quick example is that people can use a robot instead of a living human to do a dangerous job. If there was a gas leak in a building, people can send a robot inside to fix it instead of risking many lives. Life is precious. A person can replace a robot no one can replace a human life. “A world where machines and devices all communicate with each other to get the work done, leaving us free to relax and enjoy life” (Marr).
This will be our future one way or another. The average person has Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana. They use voice recognition and understand it. It is only around the corner to where the Artificial Intelligence expands from just a voice responding and responding software-wise to where it can respond with moving parts and help around the world today.
It is the future one way or another and it is happening. Artificial Intelligence will be the most helpful software because it is “free” human labor. It will change our lives by saving our time and money. “The software will be able to sift through all the available data, get a clearer and better picture of approaching weather phenomena and issue the corresponding early warnings, thus saving lives” (Castano). Using Artificial Intelligence, it can compare similar weather conditions to other times before and give a more accurate prediction of the weather by doing so. “Sophisticated software programs will allow robots to distinguish between biological organisms and pollutants, like oil or hazardous waste, while tiny microbes will consume waste products and leave good biological matter intact, minimizing damage to the ecosystem” (Castano).
Climate change and pollution are big right now. Many people know that it is happening one way or another. People have the ability to get computers and robots to deal with the problem for us by eating away the pollutants and other bacteria causing harm to the environment but not harming other plants. “IBM Watson’s accuracy rate for lung cancer is 90%, compared to a mere 50% of human physicians” (Zarkadakis). This supercomputer is better at diagnosing cancer than any human. There is no doubt.
This robot was built only for this so there shouldn’t be fear that one day it will turn on us. It is not like one day our computers will grow legs and fight us. If people have robots and artificial intelligence replacing human workers, causing unemployment rates to spike and homelessness to rise then the companies should be taxed higher than they would if they had human workers to try to keep companies to limit the amount of artificial intelligence used and to keep many workers jobs. “You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed” of automation, Gates argues. That’s because the technology and business cases for replacing humans in a wide range of jobs are arriving simultaneously, and it’s important to be able to manage that displacement” (Delaney). The fear for people is that the robots will take people’s jobs.
It is already obvious that many people are losing their jobs and they are in fear because of it. Many truckers and manufacturing jobs will have employees replaced. The simple solution is to have a much larger tax on them so that it does not spring out of control at a rapid rate. If that happens then many people will grow poor and the higher up people in the companies will become rich. But that will fall when no one can afford any products so the companies will soon have many products in warehouses until they can no longer afford to make any more. “Taxation is certainly a better way to handle it than just banning some elements of it” (Delaney).
There should not be parts of it banned because when a person bans something that usually means that they have fear of it happening, the rate and amount of it growing will become smaller and smaller over time. Because with that limit, there will be only so little that can expand and it will hit a barrier until people find a loophole. “And the bonus is that we get more humans to do jobs that require empathy” (Morris). A robot cannot be a nurse, babysitter, teacher or any types of jobs that require emotion because an artificial intelligence will never be able to give true emotion. Artificial intelligence is not good at doing new tasks but recreating old tasks that it has completed and by doing this it learns.
Kind of like a trial and error method. It would be difficult for it to do a human’s’ tasks so therefore it cannot take all jobs. Only a few. Artificial intelligence is something that needs to be welcomed into society so that people can take all of what it could bring. There will be jobs lost there is no doubt but there will be an opportunity for new jobs. There can be more jobs opened that require needs that machines cannot provide.
There will be few jobs taken by machines compared to the whole amount of jobs. Machines cannot learn without being told to study how something works then it makes a hypothesis. There is no reason to be fearful because it will come one way or another. Companies are already adopting it and Tesla and BMW have unveiled their test-driving cars.
