Artificial Intelligence

What if the next time you were hungry, you could tell your kitchen to cook a meal for you?

What if with a simple touch of a button, you could get your house to clean itself?

And what if I told you this could all be possible?

With the work of artificial intelligence or AI.

Dear readers, allow me to take you on a journey on the wonders of Artificial Intelligence.

AI is something that is becoming more advanced everyday and is disrupting our world.

To most people, the idea of artificial intelligence is fascinating, which it truly is

I mean, who wouldn't want a robot to do all our chores for us, who we can communicate with or maybe one which can even advice us like a little companion?

It truly seems like a dream come true

Some of us, including I myself, were surprised that intellectuals like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawkings and Bill Gates were genuinely concerned and against the idea of advanced AI.

Now, don't get me wrong, they are actually perfectly fine with AI at its current state right now, but are very against the idea of AI becoming better.

Because they fear the day artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence

They fear what might happen when our creations become more advanced than we are

That fear has actually been around for ages

But what made that fear a near reality was in 1997

When a robot named Deep Blue, beat the World's Best Chess Player at his own game

That moment went down in history as the first time robots defeated us

That was the first and certainly wasn't the last

In the mid 2000's a robot named Watson beat the two best players at Jeopardy, a game which requires tons of memory, analytical thinking and speed

In 2016, just last year, Google's AI beat the world's best player at a game called go, a game which requires strategy, and is generally much harder than chess is

People were impressed, but they were fearful

Machines had defeated world champions

Machines had defeated some of the best of the human species

Naturally, people had been hoping humans would win in the fight against robots and were devastated to find the outcome

And they shouldn't have been

The machines were victorious, yes

But, was it superior?

No, no it wasn't

The machine wasn't victorious because it was just intelligent, the machine was victorious because of its human creators!

Always, a machine's triumph is a human's triumph

That's something we tend to forget when humans are surpassed by our own creations

People need to realise that it isn't all about 

Human Vs. Machine

and instead,

Human Plus Machine

What if we combined our strengths and worked side by side?

Machines have tactics, we have strategies

Machines have memory, we have experience

Machines have objectivity,

We have passion

Human plus machine isn't the future, it's the present

And we don't get to choose when and where technological progress stops

We can't slow down, in fact we have to speed up

Our technology excels at removing difficulties and uncertainties from our lives

And so we must seek out for ever more difficult and ever more uncertain challenges

We should not worry about what machines can do today

Instead, we should worry about what they still cannot do

Because we will need the help of these new intelligent machines to turn our grandest dreams into reality

And if we fail, if we fail

It's not because our machines have become too intelligent or not intelligent enough

It's because we have grown too proud of ourselves and limited our ambitions

Us humans are not defined by our skills

There is one thing only humans can do

And That's dreaming!
So let us dream big!

By: Shveenita Alyza

Published by: Ethan Richard