What can the future look like with rising of Artificial Intelligence?
It’s the year 2050. Life as we knew it took a 180° turn. The world that was on the verge of calamitous collapse, although, has delayed the destruction for a couple of decades but the price it paid was, in a way, much worse. Humans are on a decline. Only a couple million humans are left, subject to eternal servitude.
Although a very dramatic scenario that seems highly unlikely to be true, there may be a chance it plays out similarly. For all we know, a Skynet is currently in development by a group of ragtag engineers or maybe a massive corporation. 50 years of pop culture must have prepared us for this. We have seen Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and many other movies that have tackled the subject of the rampant or inadvertent rise of “evil robots”. While it is questionable that something like the creation of Ultron may become a reality (a grave one in that sense), there still have been numerous strides in this field of Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence is definitely not all that bad or as murderous as it has been shown in movies (Let's remember robots like TARS and CASE from Interstellar). AI has clearly had a tremendous impact in a plethora of fields and has helped millions of companies to increase their productivity tenfold. Healthcare has been an area that has, and will, always benefit from advancements in AI. Easy accessibility of medical databases and faster diagnosis are just two of the numerous improvements that AI has achieved in this sector. Integration of Artificial Intelligence with healthcare will lead to a whopping 40% annual growth in the market.
It may just be an urban myth that AI will turn evil but the truth is that AI may just turn out to be much more competent than us with goals misaligned with ours. The benefits of AI equate the risks posed by it. An AI-powered smart home, if developed in the future, will be crucial in cutting basic costs hence helping in saving money. Homeworks and assignments will definitely be easier to solve and that alone trumps all the disadvantages. But a huge risk that is being taken by unification with AI is in the weapons sector. The weaponization of AI, currently, is the single worst thing that can happen. The only way the threat can be reduced is by not giving full autonomy to just a collection of 1s and 0s. No string or variable can beat human nature and morality. We have to remember that a heat-seeking missile cannot differentiate between an innocent child and a grown man. It just identifies the heat signature as a target.
There still is time to fully understand the potential of Artificial Intelligence and then merging it in broader aspects to theoretically make our lives better. After all, as Murphy’s Law states “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” And there is a lot that can go wrong.
