The Utter REALity of Artificial Intelligence: Why Choose to Study A.I.?
Time to wake up.
We’ve all heard the praises and condemnations of Artificial Intelligence. From respected key players in the tech industry, Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg. A.I. has become a major buzzword that is becoming more casual as the days go on. Small businesses are even thinking how they can implement A.I. into their operations before even really understanding what they mean by it. Along with all of the hype, in a very famous and recent interview where Elon Musk is on camera smoking weed, he bears a grim countenance when the interviewer gets down to it and asks the tech entrepreneur what he really thinks. I’m starting to realize firsthand what Mr. Musk is concerned about.
As a senior computer science student, I’m digging into more real life and practical programming projects to include in my personal portfolio before I graduate. This week that subquest has lead me to a Udemy course that is a pretty in-depth introduction to programming A.I. through Python. As I’m progressing through the first chapter that is mostly conceptual, I’m learning a few interesting things. Surface level — A.I. technology has surpassed the natural intelligence of certain animals in our animal kingdom and is closing in on rivaling the natural intelligence of an actual human mind. As this trend is growing exponentially, it is projected that even in twenty to thirty years, A.I. could grow beyond double the natural intelligence of a human.
This is alarming when someone tells you these facts, but then I start looking at an A.I. in action. The course was explaining certain algorithmic concepts such as the Bellman Equation, Markov Decision Processes (I encourage everyone to research this type of decision processes as I have learned they have an incredible amount of practical application to MANY areas of expertise), and Q-Learning through a sixteen square game board with certain obstacles mixed within the game environment. The object of this simple game was to get from one corner to the other and not fall into the game piece that represented a pit of fire and overall death for the A.I. The instructor paused the video and asked me, the student, to use the equation the A.I. was using and predict how the A.I. would react in a few situations. When the instructor played how the A.I. actually reacted to the calculations it was making something completely unexpected and quite mind blowing happened. The A.I. virtually learned invincibility given its environment with many obstacles to overcome. It completely made up an outside-the-box solution that was very creative in order for it to have a minuscule chance of ever falling to its death.
This is modern day, folks. The A.I.’s game board will reach much beyond 16 squares, and quite frankly already has. There’s a very real possibility that we won’t always be able to control what this very smart technology views as “an obstacle”. This is also why I’m concerned enough to devote my higher education to understanding how to control, understand, and develop these technologies for the better of humanity.
This is also not meant to scare anyone or declare this technology as evil. This technology is and always has been imminent based on the technology rise in humanity’s blip of history. It’s a comet that’s hurdling straight towards the Earth and we have to find a way to break it up so it might actually land as a beautiful meteor shower that isn’t too harmless. This could actually be very helpful to humanity if used in the right ways. For example, we’ve all said, “Oh well by the time I’m 80 years old, they’ll have a cure for everything!”. Well, I’m not saying this is necessarily true, but with A.I. we’ll be on our way to many more breakthrough discoveries that we may not have even considered possible.
Written with human love and thx for reading.
