Why I am not afraid of Artificial Intelligence, and why you shouldn’t be either
Brian Fish
Published: July 14th, 2023
I’m here to tell you to chill when it comes to AI or Artificial Intelligence. Do not be afraid. You don’t need to hide the women and children. We’re going to be fine. In fact, we’re going to be better off. Well, at least most of us.
Yes, AI will replace some jobs; it already has. But it will also create jobs, which is obviously important. But even more important are the advances that we’ll make as a civilization using Artificial Intelligence. Cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, ALS… all can be achieved by the abilities of technologies created with AI to do things that couldn’t be done by humans.
I watched a 60 Minutes feature on AI a couple of weeks ago. I encourage you to watch it yourself. Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind, was interviewed. DeepMind has been a leader in AI development and one of the pioneers as well since 2010. He was asked for an example of how AI has already been used for the better. His answer astounded me. DeepMind, through their project called AlphaFold, can predict the 3D structure of every protein known to science. A couple of things here: between plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria, there are over 200 million proteins known to science. Also, a human could potentially sequence just one protein while achieving their PhD, which typically takes 5 years. Therefore, what could have taken humans 5 * 200 million years to understand, AlphaFold did so in a couple of years. And then, it gave it to the scientific community so they could go out and create new and better drugs, treatments, and cures for the things that ail all of us. That is just one example, and there are many more. IBM’s Watson has been helping to diagnose diseases and determine the best treatments because it was taught to read.
From personal assistants to self-driving cars, AI is here to help us. But I know the other side of the coin is, will AI hurt us? Will technology that can learn on its own outpace our ability to contain it? The “Terminator” scenario. While I love the Terminator movies, I’ll just say that it’s Hollywood. And the potential for some type of self-aware computers creating Armageddon could happen… anything is possible, but I say no way. Why? Because systems created with AI are not sentient; they cannot learn on their own. AI can find, understand, and get better at things, but figuring things out is a different story. Humans can rationalize; computers can only analyze. That’s a big difference.
