With the advent of realistic chat-bots, voice simulators and art at the push of a button, it’s understandable that fears around AI have surfaced. These breakthroughs represent a tipping point into a new era of automation and virtual fakery, with worrying implications for everything from work to warfare. AI is badly misunderstood and misrepresented, however, especially in many instances by those working in the tech sector.
The main problem is definitional. Our fears of AI, expressed in sci-fi films like Terminator, I, Robot and The Matrix, is of the creation of a new human-like intelligence, an electronic mind capable of hostility and malice. This atavistic terror is rooted in our deepest fears and instincts, going back to stories of ghosts, demons, monsters, evil spirits and vampires. On-screen confrontations vary between presenting the artificial intelligence as evil, misunderstood, or hostile but capable of reconciliation. This whole paradigm is deeply misleading — because it is not clear if artificial intelligence in this sense will ever come into existence, or is even possible in the first place.
Read Full Article »