A good friend of mine who is a fan of both science and sci-fi often warns my social circle of the robot takeover. Teller does a 2 minute segment on explaining why this fear is still very premature. I felt this reaction comment also summed up the idea well.
Right now AI is responsible for keeping planes in the air, market analysis, data mining, and gps navigation... It’s also the cause of auto-correct giggles, awkward Netflix recommendations, and music that can be difficult for a human audience.Â
More importantly, these are all things we directed the AI to do. Sure as AI, the program makes decisions on how to do a given task, but we outline the sandbox and give it the methods it uses to make those decisions.Â
In the meantime we have climate change, a globalized economy, multiple armed conflicts while staving off true war, not to mention struggles with bigotry, mental health, and basic human needs hampered by poverty that all seem like pressing issues.
Maybe letting decent programmers reduce the cognitive load of some of our more mundane tasks so we can wrap our heads around the tough issues isn’t such a bad idea. The same way many conspiracy theories are scuttled by evidence of incompetence, auto-correct just can’t care about domination.
