Artificial Intelligence — How Concerned Should You Be?

The digital world is shifting toward artificial intelligence (AI). We want voice searches and digital assistants to be more human-like—and that means artificial intelligence. While the idea that someday there will be a robot apocalypse is the work of science fiction; however, there are legitimate concerns that make AI a difficult thing to accomplish. Here are a few of those worries.

Artificial Intelligence Have a Single-Minded Focus

One of the primary things that always come up in fictional AI storylines is the concept that robots take over the world to save it from humans, or to save humans from themselves. It demonstrates an interesting point. Even a machine that is programmed with a degree of AI will still struggle to weigh decisions like a human does. For example, a cleaning robot will not have the same sentimental attitude toward your trophy collection, and may knock it to the ground to get to all of the dust on the mantle. How do you program a robot to care about your things in the same way as you do?

They Are Rewarded for Shortcuts

True artificial intelligence would require a machine to have a sense of satisfaction in accomplishing its assign tasks. The problem is: how do you stop the robot from taking on the human attitude of looking for shortcuts to get to the reward? Will a cleaning robot (bot) feel just as good if it tosses your clothes under the bed and your kid’s toys in the closet as doing the actually cleaning? What if the robot goes truly rogue and starts messing things up just to clean and complete an assignment?

Exploration Dangers

Like a human, a machine programmed with AI will want to explore possibilities and expand horizons. What if your cooking robot decides to experiment with an ingredient that in theory will taste good, but in reality, is deadly? The droid may be programmed to never intentionally poison someone, but what if it was an accident in an effort to create a new and exciting dish?

These are just a few of the concerns that developers have as they work on AI for future automated helpers. For now, about the worst things a digital assistant can do is to give you bad directions or a recommend a crummy restaurant.