Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) Scary?

While the media is abuzz with the application of AI in almost every fabric of our personal and professional lives, people are worried about being replaced by the robots in the not so distant future. Is this going to be true? Will the robots rule over humans?

Let us first decipher what does Artificial Intelligence mean? Artificial intelligence (AI) is a term for simulated intelligence in machines. These machines are programmed to "think" like a human and mimic the way a person acts. Artificial intelligence is based around the idea that human intelligence can be defined in such exact terms that a machine can mimic it.

Let us now look at how human intelligence works.

Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie in their book, “The Book of Why” explain. Human intelligence essentially works in three ways: Seeing or Observing, Doing or Intervening and Imagining; retrospection or understanding.

Through observation, we associate the observed fact with a conclusion or belief. In this approach, we limit ourselves to the passively collected data and try to find a pattern which may help us predict a conclusion.

Through doing or intervening, we mentally try to change the observed data, which is the basis of prediction. We ask, “What would be the result, if I did something else? Or, how can I make this happen?” No amount of passively collected data can help us answer such questions. And yet, we humans often use this approach effortlessly in making-up our minds.

Through imagining, retrospection or understanding, we go back in time, change history, and ask, “What would have happened, if I had not taken that job?” Passively collected data become ineffective to answer such questions. We cannot run an experiment of denying job to a person who has already worked on that job and compare the results. Yet the human mind makes such explanation-seeking inferences reliably and repeatedly.

George Bernard Shaw has famously said, “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

Now the question is, “Can this vast human intelligence be defined in such exact terms that a machine can mimic it?” If yes, we have reasons to fear AI.

Presently, machine learning programs (including deep neural networks) operate almost entirely in an associational mode. They are driven by a set of observations to which they attempt to fit a function. However, complex this function may be, raw data still drives the fitted function. The programmed driverless car cannot predict how a pedestrian under the influence of alcohol will respond to a honking horn. A recent fatal incident involving a driverless car and a pedestrian in the USA is a testimony of such serious flaws.

Mathematicians and Scientists have realized such serious limitations of the machines and are busy developing “Causal Models” that may try to mimic human way of thinking, but will they come even close? We must not forget that a machine is after all developed by a human mind. And hence, no matter how advanced they may become, they will remain subservient to human mind.

Having said this, AI powered machines will take over all those jobs which are currently based on passively collected data and their analyses. However, this shouldn’t be viewed as a threat. Indeed, this is an opportunity for humans to rise above the current level of working, and tap into those areas of their minds which have remain dormant all this time.

Therefore, upskilling and reskilling is the only way forward for the human race to sustain and thrive in the future.

I suggest taking following steps to capitalize on this golden opportunity of the AI knocking at our future doors:

• Make friendship with the AI. It is here to help us do our work more efficiently and effectively. Indeed, we should call it “Augmented Intelligence”, instead of “Artificial Intelligence”.

• Learn and use available and evolving AI tools in day-to-day work. Many of them are freely available, at least at present. Make a habit of getting familiar with one tool every week. A word of caution: don’t share your confidential information/document with any online tool.

• Focus on sharpening your soft skills: communication, teamwork, leadership, time management, adaptability, problem-solving, critical thinking, work ethic, creativity and emotional intelligence.

• Make your life simple. Declutter all those aspects that create confusion and irritation in the mind.

• Spend some time with the nature and practice meditation. This will help you rooted in the reality, lest you get lost in the virtual world.

• Search for the real purpose of your life and what makes you deeply happy. Direct your energy towards such goals.

• Remember: you are a unique creation of the nature with unlimited capacity to think and create.