You may have seen the movies like Terminator and iRobot. They all depict our nightmare scenario that, one day, robots and artificial intelligence will take over the world.
You might think, “Have we not already seen things like artificial intelligence and robotics crash and burn?” And the answer is yes, spectacularly, in some cases. In just March of this year, Microsoft made Tay.ai, a program that was built to learn from actual people’s tweets and then tweet its own tweets. Well, in less than a day, the internet transformed the Twitter account into a platform for racist and hateful rhetoric.
The Tay.ai incident also gave society insight on how dangerous artificial intelligence might be in our futures. A machine or program powered by artificial intelligence might be harder to adjust than a human finger sending out tweets. Though the fear of these rogue programs might strike fear into some critics, there are substantial benefits of robotics and artificial intelligence.
In August of this year, IBM’s Watson program, which can examine patients’ medical records and compare them to 20 million others compiled by the University of Tokyo, made a diagnosis that had previously stumped doctors. There was a female leukemia patient who was not responding to any of the treatment courses the doctors were exploring, so they called upon Watson.
In a mere 10 minutes, Watson had solved the case.
As it turned out, doctors had initially misdiagnosed the patient’s specific case of leukemia, and a new course of treatment proved far more successful than the previous course.
Implementing artificial intelligence in self-driving cars can seriously improve quality of life in the future. Imagine traffic-free cities. No rush hour. Traffic would also be safer. According to research done by Carnegie Mellon, driverless cars could eliminate up to one million traffic accidents, including 10 thousand fatal accidents, per year.
Not only could driverless cars be safer in traffic, but they can also drive passengers to a hospital during a medical emergency. In July, a man’s Tesla drove him to a hospital when he was having a pulmonary embolism, of which his doctors say he was lucky to survive. Higher-end Mercedes Benz vehicles like the E63 AMG monitor about 84 parameters about a person and road conditions to determine if the driver is drowsy or not.
Top Gear’s Richard Hammond said while driving the E63 that, “I was in the intensive care unit, and they were not measuring 84 things about me.” The E63 measures things, like certain steering conditions and how often the driver is interacting with vehicle inputs, to determine how drowsy the driver is. Couple this with an ability to drive a passenger to a hospital, and self-driving cars can save countless lives.
Artificial intelligence can be a very beneficial and life-saving tool that we humans can utilize. But that is just how it should remain: A tool. We really need to be careful with how we implement AI because, in greedier hands, it has the potential to do major damage that could be even worse than Microsoft’s Tay.ai incident. This could be one of the great problems of our generation, and we need to be on the lookout for it.
James Halbrook is a sophomore chemical engineering major from Brandon.
