Curious about AI?
Artificial Intelligence! Is it about humans vs technology, or AI's potential to augment our human potential? Let's explore...
Picture from Ideas.Ted.Com Article
Let’s talk AI for a minute.
To be clear, I will not be entering the debate around what might happen to mankind when robots take over! I get it, there are some big names calling out the dangers of AI, and in truth, there are important issues that need to be addressed. But, we really don’t know where AI will take us, and in my opinion climate change at this point is a far greater risk, which we understand well enough such that a real difference can be made right now!
But I digress. I’m hoping to give you a little insight into AI, piquing your curiosity about its potential for our lives and all of humanity. Keeping in mind that mankind is naturally resistant to change, let’s put those fears down for a bit and see if we can’t find good reasons to get excited about the possibilities that lay before us.
So here we go!
What I am going to assert here is that our exploration of artificial intelligence has huge potential for supporting humans in the process of accelerating our own evolution!
Intelligence is no easy feat. It involves “the ability to perceive or infer information, and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context” (wikipedia). Humans, animals, and even plants exhibit intelligence by this definition!
But there are other tools in the human arsenal that are used in cognitive processes - like our feelings and emotions, the beliefs and the virtues we innately value, and our moral capacities. The complexity of human rationality, along with subjective experience and our innate autonomy, is something we explore as part of AI when we ask questions about how to create natural virtuous behaviors in a machine.
Throw in a dose of creativity, and this could be extremely useful for the global challenges we face today. For examples of this, check out this TEDx Talk to see just how creative AI can be and how it aligns to our natural evolution over time and into the future!
[Footnote for the Uber Curious] A Context for AI1 ← Click the “1” to see footnote
It seems, based upon the epic polarization of groups around the world, that there are emotional factors that are tipping the scales of logical thinking into very biased territory (on all sides). This makes for a very troubled world.
The amazing thing is this: if we could communicate with each other beyond our emotional biases, leveraging a protocol founded in sound reasoning and collaboration, we would find that our inherent ideals are very similar.
Enter AI. The real danger is not that it can take over the world. The potential here arises inside the new perspectives AI can offer us if we let it crunch the data from the “arguments” so many are engrossed in.
You see, AI is not capable of emotional bias. However, it is fantastic at creating logical solutions for extremely complex problems. Because of its unique capabilities, in many cases it is more capable of sorting through mountains of data and creating very logical and adaptive solutions than we are.
Here’s the thing; AI can demonstrate levels of creativity that extend beyond our own efforts previously applied to the same arena. This isn’t to say it could do these things without us. We are actually an important aspect of what provides direction and context for the arena that AI will work in. But due to the sophisticated nature of its “thinking” and its ability to leverage vast amounts of data, something that would take us centuries to achieve manually can be done in short order well outside the reach of what we can do on our own.
[Footnote for the Uber Curious] AI Creativity2 ← Click the “2” to see footnote
When you apply this type of intelligence to the more logical or systematic areas of human life, we have already proven that AI can take on many of the tasks that humans once did or now do (especially in tandem with robotics).
But it goes way beyond these simples tasks! AI can be leveraged to move us forward in ways that transform entire markets (from the above TEDx Talk):
For each picture we are moving from an old style of creativity, to a new approach that is more efficient, improves the human experience, and supports a natural balance that cares for the environment instead of destroying or depleting it.
As Maurice Conti states in this talk: “Thanks to our augmented capabilities [when humans and AI work together], our world is going to change dramatically. We’re going to have a world with more variety, more connectedness, more dynamism, more complexity, more adaptability, more beauty.”
I’m not saying you should believe this, although he is certainly passionate about the potential. I do believe, as I mentioned in the beginning, that there is real potential for AI to be used for tremendous good in this world!
So, if by chance, you are concerned about the negative impact of AI, it’s my pleasure to offer a different perspective worth exploring. Set any emotional biases aside just for a short time, and discover the possibilities instead of the dangers!
To be clear, I’m not expecting you to suddenly accept AI as an answer to all things! Instead, the purpose of this is one thing only - to flex and grow your innate ability for curiosity!
Speaking of curiosity, what do you think about AI?
Is it a threat to civilization?
Are you optimistic about its potential?
Other thoughts or ideas?
Leave your comments below — I look forward to hearing what you think!
Life Quotes:
Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.
FOOTNOTES
Context for AI
Let’s take a quick and formal look at three kinds of AI so we have some context to work with:
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans.
Human intelligence is the intellectual capability of humans, which is marked by complex cognitive feats and high levels of motivation and self-awareness.
Ancient Intelligence [redefining this term for this article] represents the two primary ways our mind controls our choices. It’s essentially made up of 1) automatic thinking and 2) critical thinking - more to come on this shortly (simple background here - more advanced background here). I call it Ancient because it is literally built into the way our brain is segregated and how it operates together, creating a programatic-like approach to how we think, make decisions, and take action in our daily lives.
AI Creativity
Creativity in AI is a hard concept to get your head around, and the landscape for exploring this potential is deep and wide. Here are two clips with links to articles on this topic.
This first one is a simple explanation with some real-life examples:
“Can an AI be creative?
No human is born with abilities like writing, drawing, or singing—they’re skills we develop by observing and acting upon data, which we call “learning.”
Similarly, AI can observe and learn from data to gain creative skills like drawing, musical composition, and writing. Machine learning is the gold standard for AI, and involves quickly and efficiently training an AI model on far more data - whether that data is text, music, images, etc. - than a human could take in a lifetime.
The theory goes that if you feed an AI 100,000 poems, or 1 million pieces of pop music, the AI can analyze the patterns in them and then come up with its own. So today, AI has been used in a number of creative fields traditionally assumed to be “uniquely human”.” ~ Can Artificial Intelligence Be Creative? by Craig Wisneski
This second one is from ScienceDirect.com and goes real deep! But this paragraph gives a powerful definition of the context for AI’s creative potential:
“What is creativity in artificial intelligence?
AI techniques can be used to create new ideas in three ways: by producing novel combinations of familiar ideas; by exploring the potential of conceptual spaces; and by making transformations that enable the generation of previously impossible ideas.
If AI can handle the dangers and promise of travel through self-driving cars, it can likely find the common ground of most of our arguments. “
~ Creativity and Artificial Intelligence by Margaret A. Boden