Question

 

This TED talk was not only interesting and eye-opening but also scary and thought-provoking. I believe that Sam Haris is doing a great job at introducing these kind of talks within our society because many people forget to look at the bad things and negative consequences that could arise from creating a machine or robot that exceeds human intelligence. In many ways, this topic can seem very appealing when you first hear about it. Think about it, we would have the help of machines that are much more intelligent than us and that can work and understand things at a speed that we would be unable to achieve. But this can also cause several problems. For instance, Haris mentions that if these machines were to start working at the same time as a Stanford or MIT group, they would be able to get more than 20,000 years of human level intellectual work. This would not be able to last long as the machines would realize that we cannot keep up and they might decide to "eliminate us", in the same way that Haris says we "annihilate ants when they are in our way". I also like the fact that he shows us how short 50 years is actually because many people use the excuse that it might not affect them because they won't be alive. However, this seems to be a very selfish approach since if it doesn't affect you directly, it will at some point affect your children, or grandchildren.

In topics that create so much controversy I think it is difficult to see what will be the outcome. Nonetheless, I do believe that it is necessary to bring up difficult topics such as these so that we are really aware of what all the outcomes are. For example, I had never even imagined the fact that these machines could be so superior to us that it ends up being a problem and could lead to a war between humans and machines. These thoughts can seem ironical or even surreal but it could happen because as Haris mentions, " we hvae no idea how long it will take us to create the conditions to create these machines safely".

Answer 1

I personally believe that artificial intelligence if brought into the human world can open a whole new era of development into this world. The efficiencies of a human and machine would be no match and the output would be unimaginable since the machine would be fast, accurate, intelligent, and a higher production levels can be achieved. The human race have evolved by bringing about a constant improvement and new scientific discoveries. We always work on adapting and improving performance, design, output of the machines and thats how human race evolves as the famous greek philosopher plato said that "necessity is the mother of invention". We continued developing ourselves and now comes the time of artificial intelligence.

If machines are provided with artificial intelligence it can create a revolutionary development in the world like the scientist has never imagined. According to Haris the spectrum of intelligence is immense and undefined so it will take us a reasonable amount of time to explore the possibilities but on the other hand the machines can explore these immense dimensions of intelligence much more faster than we can since they will be hell lot smarter than we are. There might even be a possibility that these machines start to improve on their own, may even override the commands given by the user. Intelligence is a God's gift to the human race and thats what seperates the barrier between a human and an animal and thats what makes it different from other species.

These machines can develop themselves on their own and we can lose control over them for it will take a considerable amount of time for humans to reach that level of intelligence as the machines would achieve overnight. The humans will have no idea of what is going on since they will achieve a level of intelligence like no one else could. Since these machines are far more stronger and inteligent, they may gain control over the entire human race which may lead to the end of the human race. So Haris suggests that the development is necessary and it has to take place but it needs to be developed to the extent that it will always be under our full control.

It reminds me of a similar situation in the famous hollywood movie "I,robot" by director alex proyas. Although it is a fiction work but it won't be too long till our world could see a similar situation in 50-100 years from now.