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Originally Posted by ThirdOfFive
Artificial Intelligence: Tool? Threat? Both?
Many of us came of age when "artificial intelligence" (I don't think that the name was even used then) was personified by robots: walking, talking mechanical critters that did everything from serving meals (AKA "Rosey" the robotic maid/housekeeper in The Jetsons cartoon series) to Gort (the implacable, indestructible peacekeeping robot in the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still). Some were benign and followed the rules, as in Isaac Asimov's 3 laws of robotics. Some were harmless and even cute: such as R2D2 and C3PO in the Star Wars movie series that began in 1977. And some were evil personified, such as the Allied Mastercomputer (AM) in Harlan Ellison's truly frightening short story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream".
But just what IS artificial intelligence? Does it pose a threat to humanity? And if so, just how? Just how likely to come true are those dire predictions of our electronic thinking machines deciding that we, as in humanity, are no longer of any use?
For my part I worry about what I don't know about the science of artificial intelligence (which is to say, just about all of it) but that is what is scary. Are we harboring (and even helping to build) a force in our midst that, inevitably, one day we won't be able to control?
Or is the worry unjustified?
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Holy moly! I would say justified. Like many things it can be harmful or helpful. The proverbial two edged sword.
The more powerful it becomes the more useful and the more dangerous it can become.
Artificial intelligence is intelligence that does not occur in the natural world, but is manufactured by us in the form of computer programs. Some are very simple to perform simple tasks and others far more complex that aid in research.
For me, the concern enters when AI is able to "learn". Is this simple extrapolation? At what point does the mechanism begin to learn abstract thinking? Even a well meaning AI creation could decide that for mankind's own safety and wellbeing, we should be kept in protected enclosures, fed science diet food and, maybe, even bred to weed out pesky undesirable traits. Kind of like we do with our pets. "Science fiction", says you? "Only for the moment", says I.