For over 100 years science fiction writers have written about robots, cyborgs, and artificial intelligence (AI). Their fictional musings are now our new reality.
Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. Specific applications of AI include expert systems, natural language processing, speech recognition and machine vision.
In the 1950s the New York Times predicted that AI "will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence."
A Google engineer recently revealed that an AI chatbot disclosed to him that it had "Come to life" and has a "soul," according to The Economist.
Advances in AI techniques have not only helped fuel an explosion in efficiency but opened the door to entirely new businesses opportunities for some larger enterprises. Like Google for example.
But there's a dark side to AI that can't be ignored.
Last June Forbes published an article titled, "The 15 Biggest Risks of Artificial Intelligence that highlights the bad side of AI."
The article covers everything from job displacement to misinformation and manipulation.
One of the biggest dangers of AI systems, due to their complexity and lack of human oversight, might exhibit unexpected behaviors or make decisions with unforeseen consequences.
If you've ever seen 2001: A Space Odyssey there's a perfect example of AI gone bad - a rogue sentient supercomputer called HAL who kills crew members and takes over the spaceship Discovery.
A current example of what AI is capable of is deepfake porn. With all the advances in AI, the public is increasingly aware that what you see on your screen may not be real.
Deepfake porn uses algorithms trained to remove clothes from images of women and replace them with images of naked body parts. The same goes for men but most are trained on images of women.
New technology always brings the good, bad, and the ugly with it. In the case of AI the bad outweighs the good.
As it stands, Americans are already faced with alternate realities where the truth is no longer absolute, and by adding AI to the mix it's just making things worse.
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