Page 24 - Ocean Blue World Summer 2019 Edition

FROM THE CHAIRMAN

ormerly the province of futurists, artificial intelligence (AI)
AI F the cautionary tales of science fiction, it is not the end of the
is now commonplace, an everyday reality. Not only are robots
among us, in many ways they have already taken over. Despite

world, merely the beginning of new one.
What is AI? It is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to
natural intelligence (NI) exhibited by humans and other animals. AI
can interpret external data, learn from it and use what it has learned to
complete tasks and achieve specific goals through flexible adaptation.
AI, also described as machine intelligence, can closely mimic cognitive
functions including learning and problem solving.
REALITY AI is not new. It was founded as an academic discipline in 1956. Since

then, the field has been buoyed by the notion that human intelligence can
be described so precisely that a machine can be made to simulate it. This
FOR THE raises arguments about the ethics of creating synthetic beings endowed with
human-like intelligence.

FUTURE The topic has been explored in myths, fiction and philosophy. Authors from
Mary Shelley in Frankenstein to Isaac Asimov in I, Robot have stimulated
public imagination through dystopian AI scenarios. Hollywood has also
pushed our buttons. Blade Runner, the 1982 cult classic starring Harrison
Ford, features bio-engineered humans, called “replicants,” with implanted
memories that long to live another day and experience emotions. In Her, a
romantic science-fiction comedy, a lonely Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with
the empathetic voice of Samantha, an off-camera virtual assistant played
by Scarlett Johansson. Ex Machina presents Oscar Isaac as a narcissistic
inventor who creates comely feminine robots - fembots - in his mountain
aerie. One of them, a semi-disembodied Alicia Vikander, ends up stabbing
her creator and escaping.
With outcomes like these, there are those who believe the godlike technology
of AI will present a threat to humanity if it progresses without governance,
but that is a minority view.
According to Yuval Noah Harari, author of Homo Deus: A Brief History
of Tomorrow,
“Humans won’t fight machines (in the name of freedom and
individualism), they will merge with them. We are heading to
marriage rather than war.”
He also says, “On the other hand, global power might shift as the principal
force of evolution, natural selection, is replaced by intelligent design.”
Harari poses some unsettling questions. What happens to democracy when
Google and Facebook come to know our likes and political preferences
better than we know them ourselves? Will Silicon Valley end up producing
new religions rather than just novel gadgets? What becomes of the welfare
state when intelligent machines push humans out of the job market and
create a massive new “useless” class?
A recent article by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker notes that “The old
robots were blue-collar workers, burly and clunky, the machines that
rusted the Rust Belt.” The new ones, she reports, are “white-collar robots,
knowledge workers and quinoa-and-oat milk globalists, the machines that
will bankrupt Brooklyn.” People who make and do things are in danger of
being eclipsed by intelligent machines that can make and do things faster
and more cheaply, for example, self-driving cars and trucks.
The growth of AI development has been exponential in the twenty-first
century. Faster computers, algorithmic improvements, and access to

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