New Study to Influence the Future of AI

Artificial Intelligence will soon bring on another technological revolution, where machines may take our jobs and shake up the economy in the process. Drones are being used in warfare, Google, Tesla, and other companies are working on self-driving cars, and robots are being designed to be excellent conversationalists. As a consequence of this shifting paradigm, a new critique is also emerging, one that is concerned with the anthropological significance of a changing species.

Recently, a new center to study the implications of artificial intelligence has been established at the U.K.’s Cambridge University. Its purpose: to influence the ethical development of AI, the latest sign that concerns are rising about AI’s impact on everything from loss of jobs to humanity’s very existence. The new center will work in cooperation with the university’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk, where researchers study emerging risks to humanity’s future, including climate change, biological warfare, and artificial intelligence. The new center will also collaborate with the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, and the University of California, Berkeley. A major focus of the collaboration would be around what the study called “the value alignment program,” where software programmers would team up with ethicists and philosophers on trying to write code that would govern the behavior of artificial intelligence programs.

Studies like these show that theories about a new era in which we share the planet with non-biological intelligence are starting to be addressed more critically. They are no longer unique to the hypothetical claims of computer scientists. What this means for us, the technological generation, is a pressing concern to shape the level of influence that AI will have. Should we reject or accept the inevitable? I personally attest that we should reject it. By no means do I think that progress in the field will halt just because some people have moral concerns but we can make a personal choice to control how much exposure we have to it. Unfortunately, our perpetual tendency to be lazy will make us susceptible to choosing the most convenient option: AI that does everything for us. After all, why do something yourself, when you can have an automated program do it for you?

That does sound pretty deterministic when you put it that way. However, there is a variable that most people forget. In the first few months of retiring, people are really happy. They can finally do whatever they want knowing they have no responsibilities to address. But after some time, the euphoria fades away. Now people are just bored. That’s my hope for the future of AI. Hopefully, after AI takes off, people will realize that they cannot sustain their content by having something else think for them. We are curious creatures and no matter how domesticated we become, we cannot sever nature’s grasp on us.

It makes you wonder, is the Orwellian dystopia such a distant world?