Someone born today can expect to live to almost a hundred years old. What changes will they see in the world throughout their lifetime?
The bad actors and the benevolent digital dictators
This is not 1984.
By the end of the 21st century Artificial Intelligence will be here and it will be reshaping society. The shape that society takes may already be out of our hands but how we respond
AI has the potential to reshape society in the future because it is a general purpose technology that will be applied in all industries and across all areas of life with unpredictable second and third order effects.
When Alan Turing first conceived of thinking machines he referred to the human operator as ‘The computer’. They were the person using the machine to compute things. Over time, as machines became able to compute in ways that human operators couldn’t even understand, we dropped the notion of the human being part of the machine and the machine itself became known as ‘the computer’. The trend of separating human from machine has continued with computers controlling a myriad of things without any human operation being required.
In 1950, he posed what became his most famous question, “Can machines think?”. Turing’s test to answer this question involved a person asking written questions to a person and a machine in order to identify which is male and which is female without knowing that one is a machine. If the questioner could not tell any difference between the answers then the machine could be said to be thinking.
Turing had thought that by the year 2000 the average interrogator would have a less than 70% change of correctly identifying. Today, in 2020, a machine is still yet to pass the Turing Test and we may have to accept that it simply isn't the best way to measure machine intelligence, but in many ways it isn’t the machine passing the test that is important, it is that humans keep asking that question, even seventy years later we’re still asking, ‘can machines think?’
“Turing proved that there was no mechanical set of rules for the solutions of all mathematical problems“
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23130803-200-how-alan-turing-found-machine-thinking-in-the-human-mind/#ixzz6Tx5GKR2B
Asking whether machines can think like humans or be smarter than humans is to ask the wrong question. Machines will think like machines and be smart in machine ways. Humans are good at being humans. Machines are good at being machines.
So much of the discussion about whether AI can truly exist comes from the definition that we expect machines to think, imagine, feel, reason, and behave like humans. This anthropocentric viewpoint merely highlights the problems we will face if we continue to expect this of the machines we create. AI will not think like humans because it is not human. The question is whether the results of machine thinking can reliably be the same as human thinking, do that even if they arrive at the same answer in different ways we can be confident in the machine reaching an answer humans would be willing to accept. This takes us into the ethics of technology, to think about what we expect of our machines, how we want them to treat us.
“Can Machines Be Conscious
This is perhaps the most daunting question about machines. Consciousness is highly regarded as a trait that is unique to living things. It is generally a state of being aware of your existence. The question about machines can be more appropriately asked as “Can machines become the subject of their own thoughts””
Consciousness has implications. Might a machine that is aware of its own existence take steps to protect itself from threats? Should a conscious machine have rights?
Olafenfwa and Olafenfwa point out that machine consciousness could never be like human consciousness because we are motivated and informed by our subconscious, thoughts and feelings we aren’t aware of and don’t understand. A machine could never be affected by data it wasn’t aware of.