In this day and age, whenever the term "artificial intelligence" is mentioned, there's a good chance that most minds immediately think of Skynet from Terminator, the malevolent AI from The Matrix, or David from A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Most people have a skewed perception of AI technology, chief of that being total annihilation of human kind or complete global destruction. The irony of reality however, is that AIs lack the self-awareness that compels all living things: survival.
At any rate, artificial intelligences have greatly benefited mankind's foray into technology. We have progressed leaps and bounds in various fields, our focus being its military, medical, and business applications.
Traditional military warfare centered around forming battlefield strategies, old men meeting in the war room to make decisions, and sending young men to war and perish. Traditional wars are usually drawn out over a long period, usually measured in the span of months or years. And death tolls pile up with every passing minute. Artificial intelligences take the utilization of humans out of the equation altogther. A chilling downside to the operating processes of AIs is that they have no semblances of emotions to guide them, meaning their neural pathways operate on a "get from Point A to Point B" basis. The loss of 1000 lives would be utterly and completely insignificant in the face of an AI. The most effective way to work around the problem is to have a human at the helm to make the macro decisions, and leave field control and micromanaging to the artificial intelligence.
The threat of war aside, artificial intelligences make good companions to doctors as well. As mentioned in a medicine-based article earlier, a swarm of nano-scaled robots can be programmed to swim through a patient's bloodstream to locate the source of a potential infection or disease (for example, cancer cells or internal injuries), then eliminate the source altogther. The nanobots are linked together with a rudimentary swarm network, and with the assistance of emergent-based programming, the nanobots are able to adapt to any obstacles that they may face. This is akin to real world predator-prey tactics, where predators will not stop chasing after prey until they have caught it or lose track of it, in which case they would try to reacquire the target again.
But why stop at saving lives? Why not profit via the assistance of AI as well? The stock market is volatile and unpredictable, and naturally, someone came up with the idea of applying mathematical algorithms to help keep track of stock updates. The Internet age ensured that business data was laid bare for the entire world to peruse, and a massive amount of data accumulated on the Internet in a short amount of time. Big data was born, and companies started adopting the Big Data approach, where seemingly unrelated pieces of data or unstructured data could be used as a predictor model to help analyse future trends, which in turn could boost company profits. To assist business analysts in making sense of the data, artificial intelligences can be used to gather and summarize the data via a neural networking process, effectively speeding up the decision making processes of the business analysts.
Now, we must ask ourselves these questions: Should an artificial intelligence be made aware of its pseudo-sentience? Should they be made self-aware someday? Should they be accorded the same rights and principles as a human being? These questions might seem fanciful, meaningless even, but in the not too distant future, where artificial intelligences run companies or take care of basic human needs, then such questions might become relevant again
As a closing note, artificial intelligence are simply as it's name states: Artificial. With our current technology, it is simply not advanced enough to form ethical or moral judgments that are beyond its programmed parameters. But in time, when processing power is no longer an issue, they could very well be considered one of us. Think about it: if people from various nations around the globe could co exist in harmony (petty war aside), can't we befriend an AI as well? Here's a quote from the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, spoken by the narrator of the movie:
"Those were the years when the icecaps melted due to the greenhouse gases and the oceans had risen and drowned so many cities along all the shorelines of the world. Amsterdam, Venice, New York forever lost. Millions of people were displaced. Climate became chaotic. Hundreds of millions of people starved in poorer countries. Elsewhere a high degree of prosperity survived when most governments in the developed world introduced legal sanctions to license pregnancies. Which was why robots, who were never hungry and did not consume resources beyond those of their first manufacture were so essential an economic link in the chain mail of society."
Written by Thinesh, Kaza, Sim Zheng Chi, Khoo Foo Sheng and Tan Benwu
