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Introduction:
Humans and computers. Great friends, right? Computers are doing a lot of standardized, boring and labor-intensive work, and therefore they save us a lot of time and money. Furthermore, these systems are able to collect vast amounts of data, which is worth a lot of money. This due to the fact that organizations can analyze this data which provides them with very important insights. All these advantages push organizations into investing lots of money in technology.

Because of these investments a lot of new and innovative software technologies are being developed. For example you can think of speech recognition, online platforms, large databases, artificial intelligence and so on. This blog will elaborate on the developments in artificial intelligence, which I find very interesting.

 

So why is artificial intelligence so interesting to me?
As more and more technologies become available, the programs that are being developed become smarter as well. For example, speech recognition software is a form of artificial intelligence. These programs are algorithms, written by programmers, that become better in the goal that they have inherited from their programmers by self-learning. The data that the system has gathered will be analyzed by the system itself and will help the system to become even smarter and help it to better achieve its goal.

So what if these programs become so smart, that they learn how to write their own code? The software becomes its own programmer. Again, the software has some kind of goal which it inherited from its programmer, but in addition to the current software, it will also be able to write its own code to become better in achieving its original goal.

 

The software that wants to become the smartest thing alive! 
Now imagine that programs are able to write their own code and a programmer has been assigned to develop an algorithm that has the purpose to become as smart as possible. This would be very beneficial for human kind, right? The computer will eventually become able to do all of our highly educated work, plus it could give us the answers to lots of questions which we are currently not able to find the answers for.

The computer might also, by that time, be able to interpret what people say, recognize them via camera’s, and be able to interpret their facial expressions. The program can analyze behavior and do all sorts of behavioral studies, whilst simultaneously achieving its goal, becoming smarter. The program will run all kinds of analyses on its data and will rewrite its code when it has found prove that this new code will let it achieve its goal even faster and better. You will get a program that grows in a very fast pace to become the smartest thing alive.

But what if it becomes too smart for us? It knows exactly how we will react on certain things it says or does and it is capable of manipulating people? It will give its goal, becoming smarter, the most priority because it’s the purpose of this software. It will not be bothered by the fact that manipulating people is unethical. It therefore will choose to manipulate people to get more information or for example get access to certain databases.

A documentary I have seen gave the following example:

– When humans put a monkey in a cage and the monkey manages to escape. The humans will always be able to get the monkey back in the cage, because of the fact that we are more intelligent than the monkey.

 

So what would this imply for us?
In the future it will become very important to think well about what kind of frameworks we’ll give to these computers in order to keep them in control and still benefit from them. Of course these developments seem to be far away and we might need to wait a long time before this will become reality. Nevertheless it is very interesting and we have to start thinking about living amongst computers that might even become self-aware and that are way more intelligent than we are right now.

 

I hope you enjoyed reading my blog!