Essay Sample on AI Revolution: How Artificial Intelligence is Changing the World

Introduction

With the recent advancements in computer science and the development of software systems, the development of a functioning artificial intelligence system is becoming a real possibility. Artificial intelligence (AI) is computer systems that are able to perform tasks and functions like human intelligence. These tasks include speech recognition, decision making, and visual perception. The development of such systems will have a profound change on the technological front of the world and thus the entire society. AI will present some societal challenges and issues that we will have to overcome if the technology will be adopted and used in large scale. Societal issues are problems that are recognized by society as a problem as it affects a large percentage of the population and thus affects the ability of the population to perform optimally. For AI to be adopted and embraced by the entirety of humanity, it should be a complement to human intelligence rather than be a competitor to human intelligence.

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The idea of bringing inanimate objects to life has been with humans for long. In ancient Greece, there were myths of the creation of robots that could help people with their daily activities. However, the concepts and field of AI was founded in 1956 where the term artificial intelligence was coined. Immediately after the introduction of this field, there were concerns raised on the challenges that the creation of such systems would create. Many people cited examples from the introduction of technology and how it had radicalized the lives of the people in their time. For example, many people lost their jobs with the adoption of machines in the production process of almost every commodity. Because of this, the unemployment rates spiked which became a societal problem. The fear that people have about the adoption of artificial intelligence is founded on the notion that like every other technology that has been created by man, it will rival what they are used to and subject them to a new normal. The creation of AI will create a disruption of every aspect of our lives hitherto unseen. According to Bill Gates, AI will change the world as we know it, "First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern" (Chowdhury, 2017). Similarly, Elon Musk raises his concerns about the technology by stating, "I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that" (Chowdhury, 2017).

Societal Challenges

As shown above, the development of artificial intelligence will have far-reaching consequences and greatly affect the lives of people in different parts of the world. The social challenges that the introduction of this technology will have are numerous. The first obvious one is the loss of employment by many people in employment that can be done predictably. Many of the jobs that are done by humans rely on repetition of the same thing. An example is in a car manufacturing plan where people weld the same parts of car together over and over again. If an AI is developed that can learn how to do these tasks, then there will be no use of humans in the production plant. It is estimated that over seventy-eight percent of the jobs are predictable and repetitive physical work that can be done by an AI. Examples of these jobs include food processing, packaging, and assembly line production. It is therefore a no brainer that the adoption of AI will have profound challenges on any employment sector.

Another societal problem that will arise with the introduction of AI is inequality that is brought about by the AI. The introduction and use of AI in production will affect the ability of billions of people to live their daily lives. As shown above, many people will be rendered jobless and thus will lack the ability to earn a living. However, people will production plants will be able to have unimaginable margins of profits from the abolishment of paid human labor. This will create a state of a few people being super wealth while the majority of the population lives in direst poverty. The middle class that usually buys the processed and manufactured goods will shrink and eventually disappear. There is also the issue of wealth that is created by the AI. For instance, if the AI is used to mine asteroids in places where humans cannot reach, how will the wealth created by the AI be shared among the citizens of the world. The sharing of this wealth will undoubtedly create problems that will affect the entire society at large. This might even go as far as causing chaos among people as they try to fight for their share.

Another impact that the adoption of AI has is the threat of artificial intelligence growing to raise is the safety and privacy of people. As technology becomes better, so does the threat of the technology being used for nefarious reasons. An example is the invention of the internet. Since the invention of the internet, there are a lot of ways in which it has helped to improve the lives of everyone using it. However, the internet has also enabled people to come up with ingenious ways to do harm. An example is cyber attacks and online theft. The same is the case for AI. Although it might bring a lot of good to the lives of anyone, there is a possibility that the AI will be used by people seeking to harm others. For example, there is the possibility of terrorist groups like the Al Qaeda to use the technology to make missiles that can autocorrect to ensure that they will always hit the desired target no matter what. Privacy concerns are also another societal issue that arises with the adoption of AI. Many of the encryption software used to protect sensitive information of different individuals only works because of the complexity of the algorithms for the human mind to comprehend. However, is AI is introduced; it can easily do millions of permutations a second that can crack the hardest passwords. Because of this, sensitive information of majority of individuals will be at risk of falling into unscrupulous hands.

Furthermore, the introduction of AI to the daily lives of people all over the world will affect the education and interaction between individuals. Different companies are creating AI bots that are becoming better in mimicking the behaviors of human beings. For example, in 2015, an AI bot named Eugene Goostman won the Turing challenge. In this challenge, humans were to text an unknown entity, and after the conversation, they were to guess whether they were chatting with a human being or a machine. More than half of the humans were fooled to thinking that they were talking to another human. This was despite the fact the AI in use was still primitive at best. With further development in AI, it will be indistinguishable from human interaction, and thus interaction between people will deteriorate. Furthermore, education will be affected. People will not see the point of having an education while they can have an AI that will tell them everything they want to know from the internet with a touch of a button.

Solution

One solution to the possible challenges brought about by the adoption of artificial intelligence is to create safeguards and that limit the ability of AI to get out of hand. Such safeguards include the implementation of regulations which every developer of AI has to adhere to. This will create a sought of off switch wit which any problems with the technology can be easily stopped before it gets out of hand. According to Fundamental issues of artificial intelligence (pp. 555-572), there are two main pillars of safeguards for artificial intelligence. The first is accountability. We must be accountable for the systems that we create and thus, should use strong security safeguards like tamper-proofing, encryption, and auditing. The second pillar is agency. Here, Muller describes this to be ensuring that autonomous systems do the task to which they were created for. If an AI technology does not follow this pillar then the safeguards would be activated and the technology will be killed (Muller & Bostrom, 2016).

Another book, Artificial intelligence: a modern approach, poses the question if we can use current technologies to create safeguards for technologies in the future. The question of whether future technologies will be completely different from those available now. This book raises serious concerns on AI technologies that can rewrite their code and render themselves unrecognizable from the initial code. The initial safeguards would be for the AI program before it changed and rewrote its code. There is no guarantee that the safeguards would work on the new AI system. This is a challenge as the only way to know if it works to do it, and if the safeguards do not work then it would be a real problem. There is also the problem of intelligence getting better than that of human. The analogy that the article uses is using twigs to stop an elephant. Our puny safeguards will be no match for the superintelligence that will have grown to gigantic proportions (Russell & Norving, 2016).

The emotion machine: Commonsense thinking, artificial intelligence, and the future of the human mind is another book that discusses the challenges that implementation of safeguards for artificial intelligence will face. Despite regulations that everyone that creates AI will have to follow a particular set of rules and implement specific safeguards to the AI, there are bound to be unscrupulous people that want to create AI that has no limits. This is evident with the invention of the internet. The internet was created and is majorly policed and monitored by law enforcement. However, people seeking to do things away from the internet devised a way to do so. This is through the use of the dark web. Here people can trade and do things that would have otherwise gotten them in trouble. According to Minsky, this is an example of what will happen is a regulation is created about how AI should and must be created (Minsky, 2007).

Ethical Issues

The implementation of this solution will have several ethical challenges; the main one being whether AI is considered to be a sentient being or not. A sentient being is defined as a creature that can feel pain and suffer. With the advancements in technology, artificial intelligence software can be created to mimic the feelings and emotions of humans. At the moment the computing power needed to do this is so huge that many people do not consider the fact that one day this might be a reality. Therefore, if at onetime the AI is considered sentient, is it ethically and morally upright to have a sought of kill switch for this being. Will it be cruel to have these safeguards to regulate the life of such a program even though it might pose a problem if it is let loose.

Artificial intelligence a beautiful attempt of man to try and create something better than himself. Like any new technology, there are bound to be challenges and potential problems that the technology will have like to make people lose their jobs and to people becoming stupid. To combat this, safeguards should be put in place to ensure that any problems caused by the AI are stopped in their tracks. However, there is an ethical challenge that this solution poses. Will it still be ethical to have safeguards even after the AI has grown to be sentient? These are some of the challenges that we will have to figure out before we fully embrace the technology to be part of our lives.