Working hands by Aaron Gilson from Flickr.

In James Cameron's 1984 film The Terminator the two heroes are hunted by a murderous AI robot who wants to kill them. In the film's climactic final scenes the two protagonists find themselves in some sort of machine factory. Luckily for them they are able to start up the factory's automatic production lines, something that distracts the robot enough for them to trap it in a hydraulic press and destroy it, saving themselves and humanity in the process.

It is a fine ending to a fine film. There is a slight problem, though. There were no human-free factories in 1984. In fact, there are no human-free factories today, almost 40 years later.

Artificial intelligence can do amazing things these days. Some things are well beyond what mere humans can accomplish. Google's translation engine understands a dizzying 133 languages. AI has been shown to be better than human oncologists at diagnosing some sorts of cancer. And then we have chess, where it was a whole generation ago since a human could beat the AI champions.

According to the experts this is only the beginning of the AI era. Ever more powerful computing chips and ever more intricate algorithms will allow AIs to use its formidable powers of data handling to dominate ever more areas where humans traditionally ruled supreme. Should we be worried?

Great brain, but what about the rest?

Not necessarily. While AIs are very good at what they do, basically juggling large amounts of data, there is a reason those human-free factories do not exist. The real world is not as well-behaved as the digital world inside a computer network. And machinery to handle physical objects is nowhere near as sophisticated as the machinery to handle abstract data.

There is some logic to this. The human brain is a remarkable tool. But it was not developed to sift through large amounts of data in search of patterns. This is a very useful skill in our modern society and our brains spend significant time doing precisely this. But it is not what they were made for.

This is not the case with the rest of the human body. We still use our eyes to visually take in our surroundings. We still use our ears to listen for audio. And we still use our hands to handle physical objects. Our eyes, ears and hands have all evolved during millions, or even billions, of years to do exactly what we are doing with them. If they are...

Posts

Wikitag Contributions

Comments