What is Artificial Intelligence? 

Everywhere we look, there's talk of the upcoming technological future: a world controlled by driverless cars, robots, deep fakes, and AI. But what exactly is AI, and how will it affect our society? To dive deeper, let's take a look at the facts.

AI stands for artificial intelligence and simply means non-biological intelligence. Intelligence is often defined as the ability to accomplish goals. Early AI systems, like the one that first beat humans in chess, had skills programmed by humans, while today's best AI instead learns from large amounts of data. Today, AI is gaining gradually broader skills and, like human intelligence, it's now used in every industry. AI advises us with chatbots and virtual assistants and can even recommend who should get a job, a loan, or parole.

AI helps us write and translate languages. It entertains us with art, music, and poetry, and perhaps tricks us with deep fakes. It dominates trading on Wall Street, diagnoses diseases, and accelerates science. For example, AI can tell us if the strings in this image were cut, the balloons would fly away. This is the place where you just get turbocharged by these AIs.

Online, AI recommends what ads, products, social media posts, and search results to show us and what to block or filter as spam. On the road, AI supports ride-sharing, navigation, traffic management, and autonomous vehicles. It powers ever more powerful surveillance and ever more autonomous weapons.

The original goal of AI was building artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which, like a human child, can choose to learn any skill at the human level and, therefore, do any human job when robotically embodied. Surveys have shown that most AI researchers expect AGI within decades but with strong differences of opinion. If AGI is built, then, since it can do all jobs as well as humans, it can take over AI development too. This raises the controversial possibility that AI will start recursively self-improving, repeatedly doubling its power much faster than on the human R&D time scale, producing super intelligence that leaves human intelligence far behind. Some view this Rapture of the Geeks with excitement, while others fear that humanity will lose control and get replaced. You've probably seen fictionalized versions of this in popular culture.

There are three main narratives that define the understanding of artificial intelligence: the pro-establishment narrative, the establishment-critical narrative, and the techno skeptic narrative.

The pro-establishment narrative states that artificial intelligence will be great for humanity and is no cause for alarm. Amplifying human intelligence with AI will free people from boring and dangerous jobs and bring greater prosperity for all. Ultimately, AI will help cure diseases and unlock amazing new technologies with which humanity can flourish like never before. Contrary to Luddite scaremongering, old jobs will be replaced by new, better ones. AI can be biased against marginalized groups and misused to spread disinformation and break laws, but responsible tech companies are currently working with governments and other stakeholders to prevent this.

The establishment-critical narrative states that unelected tech leaders will gain undue power and influence through creepy and invasive AI surveillance. With their AI-powered social media algorithms, they control and manufacture a truth that includes AI isn’t a threat. Why is it legal to sell AI built to kill and to deploy AI so powerful that its makers don't fully understand it? Like Homo sapiens outsmarted and replaced the Neanderthals, AI will soon outsmart and replace Homo sapiens, first on the job market and then altogether when we're no longer needed. Whoever first creates AGI won’t have won an arms race but a suicide race, dooming humanity.

The techno skeptic narrative states that AI is merely overhyped and won’t eclipse humans for a long time, if ever. Although today’s chatbots, translators, and image generators may seem impressive, they lack a fundamental understanding of the world that they mask by learning statistics from a ridiculously large data set. Thank you.

 Written by me, Sanjula Kavinda