It has been suggested that AI is “dangerous” and that we should be wary and proceed with caution.
There is no doubt that nowadays AI is everywhere, from healthcare to finance to construction, and whilst there is rightly much excitement about the potential of AI it has been somewhat dampened by experts warning about issues such as ethics in AI. Others have claimed that as AI gets smarter we are heading towards “super intelligent AI” that will be self-learning and exhibit levels of intelligence millions of times smarter than humans. Suffice it to say, some believe this is just around the corner whilst others doubt we will ever get there.
So, today when experts talk about dangerous AI, they are referring to AI that is out of human control or AI that has been programmed to achieve a goal - and will go to any means to achieve it.
Let’s go back to the issue of ethics in AI, and consider why it is so important. If AI algorithms are biased towards certain conditions (e.g. gender, weather, weight) then it is likely that the outcomes from these models are likely to be wrong and could have an impact at a commercial and a personal level. For example, AI is now being used to filter job applicants. But with a biased model instead of making these decisions in a more efficient or fairer manner, it will simply replicate the biases of the humans on whose decisions it was trained. This is bad, bad, bad. Unfortunately at the moment ethics seems to be a buzzword that companies paste all over their literature - but pay little attention to. This could be for any number of reasons; for example getting the product to market before the competition is sometimes the be-all-and-end-all or there might be a skills-gap so that although the intention to be ethical is there, the skills are not.
It is clear that AI is here to stay, and that there is no clearcut yes/no answer to the question of dangerous AI. We need to start getting on top of these problems today by baking ethics into company mindsets, by holding companies accountable and by other means.
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