AI and Giraffe – Hao Guo

AI as an apparatus that follows simple instructions or algorithms computed by humans will not become a threat at all. On the contrary free more tedious, time-consuming jobs, getting works done more effectively, precisely, and a lot faster. I had this typical “hope statement” when I first started the readings. According to the crash course videos, the concept of AI has already been applied to many fields. And it’s making profound progress, from the financial area like loan landing to the medical industry as x-ray examine. Like many AI users, even people with zero programming backgrounds involuntary interact and negotiate with AI every day. As what’s going on behind these screens and machines remains as a Blackbox, the media and businesses took this advantage for making more profit. They exaggerated AI from a device that runs on code written by the human to an independent thing that generates and runs on its own code. However, in fact, those smart machines we use for the daily advance are not even near to the actual concept of AGI. As Michael Wooldridge mentioned in his book A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence, it took us decades from zero to one. The AI we are concerned to wipe out entire human beings is nothing more than machines for following instructions. Like the Youtuber, John Green presented in his video about how his robot companion can recognize his face but won’t be able to perform meaningful conversations or censoring and proving appropriate responses in an environment without receiving specific instructions. 

Do less humans make AI useless and less threatened to humans? Like Professor Irvine said: “American has a long history of creating a ‘new’ technology with a combination of hype, hope, and hysteria.” AI wiping out human beings is unwavering faith, but a matter of time. That’s my “hysteria” statement after I watched Ethem Alpaydin’s Machine Learning: The New AI and the documentary Do You Trust This Computer. Michael Wooldridge believes AI is hard to exceed human intelligence because AI requires tremendous space and power to process such a massive amount of data. And look back to history, what we have achieved today took much more effort and experienced more failures than we could imagine. However, like the Youtuber John Green said: “History reminds us that revolutions are not many events as they are processed.” In other words, no matter how long it took us from inventing a room large fast calculator to a pocket-small smartphone, it only takes us a happening of singularity to develop an AI to a real AGI. For example, the happening of the big bang and the first existence of living creatures. 

The singularity of AI development somehow reminds me of the studies of giraffes. Research indicates that giraffes’ necks were just as short as other animals at the very beginning. However, due to climate change (the causing remains as myth, but climate change is considered as one of them), there were fewer eatable plants left on the ground, so these short neck giraffes were forced to grew longer necks to achieve the food from upper places, along with an extra blooding pumping organ to help their hearts send sufficient blood through their extreme long neck to their heads. However, from all the fossils we discovered, we could only find the origin short neck giraffes. Still, not one fossil indicates any of their evolution processes like a mid-long neck giraffe. (Sounds so irrelevant, it just occurred to me). 

And the last I want to say after I examined all the materials is that they don’t necessarily need to be smarter than us to destroy us. Like a nuclear bomb, they are not smart but can wipe out the entire creature by a mistake made by human beings.