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<\/p>\nWhat happens when Artificial Intelligence becomes as smart as us? Avengers 2: Age of Ultron wants us to believe that, for the sake of protecting humanity, the robots will try to destroy humanity.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That makes sense.<\/p>\n
As computers grow more and more advanced, we keep reaching points that we weren’t supposed to. Computers were not supposed to be able to do anything they weren’t explicitly told to do. Until they did. Computers were not supposed to be able to beat us at chess. Until they did. Computers were not supposed to be able to play and win at Go. Until they did.<\/p>\n
Computers, however, have a vastly different style of learning, aptly named, machine learning. Humans learn in two ways: 1. Through experiences that allow humans to form connections and memories; 2. By intuitively connecting multiple\u00a0different experiences in a subconscious way. Machines need to be more explicit. They learn by taking\u00a0hundreds, if not billions, of input cases and parsing them to form judgements on past inputs and expected cases. Machines make educated guesses, based on previous decisions that users accepted, and calculate a\u00a0probability\u00a0for\u00a0each potential output based on how potentially useful it is. The machine then outputs the best\u00a0possible answer.<\/p>\n
In my sophomore year, I took a class on Artificial Intelligence where we had to code a machine learning tic-tac-toe\u00a0solver. The process was simple: create a structure that would parse through all the submitted test cases, calculate the frequencies\/probabilities of winning for each case, \u00a0and, while actually playing the game, run through all the possible moves and judge which one would likely lead to a victory. In this simple way, I was able to develop a tic-tac-toe AI that I could never beat (which, in all fairness, isn’t saying much because I’m terrible at tic-tac-toe).<\/p>\n
We don’t really need to replicate human intelligence.\u00a0Its long as we’re reaching this end goal of being able to solve problems, the process doesn’t matter. The actual biochemical processes of the human mind are irrelevant.<\/p>\n
This also allows us to eschew fearing the Singularity. If the machines aren’t smart in the same way as humans, they will never reach the same type of self-awareness as humans and we can control their thoughts. So long as we limit the bounds of the artificial intelligence by focusing on the problems we want these machines to solve rather than getting them to solve them with “human” methods, we should be able to end up avoiding “self-awareness”.<\/p>\n
We don’t need to fear technology so long as we continue to have control.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What happens when Artificial Intelligence becomes as smart as us? Avengers 2: Age of Ultron wants us to believe that, for the sake of protecting humanity, the robots will try to destroy humanity. That makes sense. As computers grow more and more advanced, we keep reaching points that we weren’t supposed to. Computers were not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8098,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29779],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-freshman-seminar"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8098"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions\/24"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}