Artificial Intelligence: AKA “AI”
This weekend, the news media have been going crazy. An AI specialist has warned that developers of AI programs could mean the end of human life on Earth by 2030!
In high school, our Language Arts class covered reading as well as writing. Literature books were thick, and usually I was totally bored with the content. But there was one that stayed in my mind. Written by Issac Asimov - I think it was a short story -- it was about robots “evolving” to the point they thought they were human. It listed three rules for robots.
The Three Laws of Robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. With these three simple directives, Isaac Asimov formulated laws for governing robots’ behavior.
The story was told from the point of view of a person who witnessed a robot crossing the line and being “captured” because it thought it was human. Turned out the entity telling the story was also a robot who thought it was human.
That short story has inspired many movies. I just wish I could remember the actual title!
“I, Robot” with Will Smith was one movie that was credited to Asimov’s story. Others were“Bicentennial Man” with Robin Williams, “Runaway” with Tom Selleck, and the Schwarzenegger “Terminator” movies, “Short Circuit”, “2001”, and probably many, many more!
I’m not wild about AI. If a student was required to prepare an essay, a short story, or a newspaper article, they could go online, tell an AI program to write the story, or they could write a story and have the AI program “clean it up”. But when that happens, is the writer’s “voice” still in the piece?
But I don’t mind that a “Google” search brings up what I’m looking for quickly and offers several additional pieces of information I find interesting or totally off the mark.
I hope that the people developing Artificial Intelligence will be very careful so that the robots cannot evolve, take over the world, and eliminate human beings.