WHAT IS THE I.Q. OF A.I.? Part 2
THE IMPACT OF A.I. ON HUMAN BEHAVIOR
“A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if these goals aren’t aligned with ours, we are in deep trouble.” - Stephen Hawkins
I am not a computer scientist, but as I see it, A.I. is a product of human intelligence and humans must remain their master for all time. What makes me uneasy and worry about is that even in its infancy, A.I. is already manipulating us, adversely impacting our thinking and our behaviors.
Unregulated social media and advertising companies with the help of algorithmically programmed simple A.I. devices are continuously feeding us with outrageous virtual reality, misinformation in multiple media formats: texts, pictures, videos, sound and music. Their algorithms know that the more outrageous they are, the more we engage with their platforms.
They are trying to make us addicted to their platforms, change our thinking, our behaviors, our purchases, even our drug choices. Without regulatory oversight, they are not concerned much about the truth, or about human value. In the process, they are making us more superficial, polarized, biased, angry and divided for the sake of more sales and more advertising dollars.
Research on human intelligence, rationality, thinking and decision making has shown that we over rely on our intuitions and our emotions for our decisions. Therefore, our decisions are not data driven or objective, but mostly subjective decisions. Yet, we live in an increasingly competitive, science and technology driven, big data generating complex world. That is where we need the help of super powerful A.I. machines to make fact based and data driven decisions.
The human brain is slow, forgetful with limited memory capacity, hindered by emotion, intuitions, previous negative experiences and sensorial perceptions from the outer world, and is overwhelmed with handling big data.
Super computers and advanced A.I. machines are much faster than the human brain, have infallible memory capacities, and devoid of feelings and emotions. Therefore, they are better at handling big data and help make objective decisions.
What worries me is that nobody knows how A.I. will evolve in the future. Even A.I. scientists say that they don’t fully understand A.I., and it is unpredictable. What if these super intelligent A.I. machines start to self-generate their own programs, and be able to identify hidden patterns in the big data with the ability of machine learning, self- correction and perfection surpass humans’ intelligence and programming and becoming their own boss, replace humans? Then what would we do?
