Big innovations come out of the blue. We get used to our life and work until something seemingly completely simple happens, which turns everything upside down. For example, we have been using phones for 100 years, but making them mobile changed the world. We had the Internet for decades, but it was the web browser that made digital education, entertainment, shopping easy and accessible to billions of people. We collected photographs, paper records, discs, until Jeff Bezos provided us with the cloud.
When individual creativity is supported by technical ingenuity, new orders and possibilities arise.
Of course, every new idea always has a group of ill-wishers who predict the worst-case scenario. Like the theory that cell phones cause cancer. Or that Big Brother is tracking your every move on the Internet. Innovation should be approached wisely, but usually detractors are among the people who will lose the most. See how the oil and auto companies stalled the development of electric vehicles until Tesla proved that there was such a market and it was quite viable.
Artificial intelligence is our next controversial invention. He is always by our side: diagnosing diseases, guiding routes, even chatting. But will he one day become the Terminator? Consider us obsolete and unnecessary? Will he enslave?
Leave the blue pill waiting for Doomsday and take the red reality pill with me.
Intelligence has provided us with all the progress we have. With intelligence, artificial or not, you need to be careful, as with any kind of innovation. Alfred Nobel realized this when he unleashed the destructive power of dynamite and later financed the heritability of human progress by instituting an award in his honor.
In a world of truly complex problems such as hunger, terror, and disease, it's hard to argue that extra intelligence will make us worse.
On a smaller scale, too, it is difficult to abandon cars that help us drive cars because they see us better, react faster and have more information. Many have savings that are not controlled by people - digital systems monitor their safety. Machine-assisted surgery provides the best results.
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Human-machine symbiosis has already found thousands of different uses, with an inquiring mind finding an unsolved problem and recruiting non-human intelligence as a tool to solve it. This is just another addition to humanity, like a stick, a fire, and a wheel.
More than 50 years ago, Masahiro Mori realized that trying to impersonate a human would be at least slightly hateful. Here are some examples:
After chatbot Tay was “forced” to write offensive tweets, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of engineering, Peter Lee, blamed anyone who was acting out of “malicious intent”.
HitchBOT was conceived as a social experiment that will show how people will interact with a friendly walking robot. The robot was beheaded shortly after starting his US travel last summer.
Six years after Apple introduced Siri, people still swear at personal artificial intelligence because sometimes it doesn't behave like human beings. Who hasn't swore at Siri?
People are not exactly opposed to machines. They are simply frustrated, resentful, or hostile when it comes to artificial intelligence.
When AI works, we take it easier - but still worry about it. In 1934, Upton Sinclair wrote that people do not understand new ideas if their lives are tied to old ones.
A revolution in intelligence might be exactly the same idea for the white collar workers of today. Automation was easy to embrace when it came to mundane tasks, but the new generation of large data applications is more like smart workers than fax machines. Again, people find themselves at a crossroads: fear of the unknown or immersion in progress.
The choice for progress is now more obvious than it ever was. A strong competitor, a smart new employee, or an economic downturn can spell disaster for the untrained intellectual worker, regardless of the role of human intelligence. Those who explore new ideas and get better at their jobs will do well and succeed, and it has always been.
Machines will not replace the need for business, profit, or growth. That is why entrepreneurs will always pull us towards the optimal use of new technologies. And they will need curious collaborators who understand Sinclair's paradigm.