In The Age of AI Reflection

     We are now ever close to the dominating age of AI. It is approaching rapidly and at times, we begin to worry if robots might actually take over the world one day.

    Well luckily, our future metal overlords have not cracked the code on world domination yet. However, they are getting smarter and smarter by picking up on human habits, and the rapid evolution of technology allowing them to keep up with the future. AI getting smarter and smarter is actually a good thing for us because it can allow many current jobs to become way easier through the hands (well I guess they would not be hands sometimes) of AI. AI and machine learning allow for tasks that would take longer for a human to accomplish, if ever, to become possible. When Google's Deep Mind AI challenged the world's top ranked player of the game Go, it began the prideful battle of man versus machine, with the winner really changing how we think about AI. In a shocking turn of events, Deep Mind was able to take home the victory, outsmarting the world's former best Go player in a series of strategies humans could not even fathom.

    So how is AI able to make these incredibly complex decisions? Well they have to learn from somewhere, and the source to all of this learning comes from us humans. In machine learning, humans teach AI an assortment of different situations and responses to those situations. The more situations you give it, the more situations it can respond to, which is why the more higher level AI's are so smart. They quite literally know everything because they have been taught everything they need to know. That's what begins to worry me about the future of AI, that the will start to become these "all-knowing" beings that can outsmart anyone. If that ever happens, how will we ever know if something is entirely real or is made up of AI?

    10 years ago, this was not entirely an issue. For instance, AI voices used to be highly recognizable if the voice being used was from an AI program. Now, AI has gotten so smart at picking up voices through speech impediments and vocal patterns that it is extremely hard to tell what is real and what is fake. This could have dire consequences today as AI could just easily impersonate a figure to say something false, outlandish, or even worse, offensive. In something like our national security, if we hand over those duties to an AI program, it is now completely out of our control if the AI does not do its job among other means. 

The idea of AI is now a more pressing idea thanks to its quick evolution in the last decade. It can be a good thing with how smart an AI becomes because it can now help us solve problems humans would not be able to think of. But what would happen if that thinking were to suddenly turn on us? Would robots rule the world? Would humans become extinct? It is hard to tell but if the world closely monitors AI, its rise to power might not be as nerve racking as it sounds.