There has been so much hype about artificial intelligence that rock-star historian-turned-futurist Yuval Noah Harari thinks that man (Homo sapiens) will evolve into Homo deus ― almost god-like through technology and science, conquering famine, war and possibly even death.
We used to suspend belief through science fiction, until large parts of the gadgets that we watched in “Star Trek” in the 1960s become reality. With the ability of computers to beat the best human Go champion, science fiction is becoming reality. The computer AlphaGo can not only learn from humans, but play and learn from games against itself. The machines are getting smarter than all of us.
The reason “Star Trek” and other sci-fi movies are so popular is because they explore in an entertaining way all the moral dilemmas of science. Will robots end up killing their makers? When we intervene in a new planet, do we not kill off or change irreversibly their life forms? As science and technology advances to the point where we can edit our genes, we can create either extended life or new monster Frankensteins.
The first thing to remember about AI is that it is a derivative of human intelligence. AI is the result of cumulative human knowledge, with each discovery, each process, each innovation, each new institution leading to the opening of new fields of knowledge. We are at the edge of an explosive field of new knowledge.
Current artificial intelligence is the discovery that knowledge advances through algorithms, defined as “a methodical set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions” (Hariri, 2015, pg. 83). You can program a computer or robot a set of algorithms, learning to learn and learning to adapt. Perhaps computers can even learn how to identify and write algorithms.
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(Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective.)