In the article “The business of artificial intelligence) by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew Mcaffe (2017), they stated that most big opportunities of AI have not yet been tapped. I questioned myself when I read this sentence, what exactly is the big opportunities? Does it mean that when AI can do what exactly human being do, AI reaches its crest stage? And what would happen after that? Besides, should we worry about the safety of the AI technology since it has large potential? I tried searching for articles on expectations of AI technology in the future.
There is one article answers part of my concern about “safety” and “the opportunity of AI”. The article is called “Benefits & risks of Artificial Intelligence”, published by the “future of life institute”. In this article, the author discussed the potential risks of applying AI, the recent interest in AI safety, top myths about advanced AI and opinions about whether we should worry about the future AI robots/ superintelligence. Two reasons of AI being dangerous is 1) AI being programmed to do something devastating, such as military usage, and 2) developing a destructive method for achieving a goal. The example for reason 2) in the article is that self-driving car will bring a person to the airport without considering traffic rules when the person told the car to drive as fast as possible. Because of the aforementioned reasons, nowadays people are more interested in the safety problem in AI.
In addition, due to some “demonized” film or animation, people would concern about the future superman AI, who can substitute human in daily life or lead to war. However, the article stated that these misunderstanding could not be true. Currently, the superhuman AI technology has not been fully developed yet and there is still a long time to go. Furthermore, the safety concerns have been aroused, so more controls and designs would be developed. Consequently, we do not have to consider artificial intelligence as an “evil”. Being smarter and strengthening our own capability can help us to succeed in the future with the existence and competition of artificial intelligence.
For more details about the article, please find the link: https://futureoflife.org/background/benefits-risks-of-artificial-intelligence/
