Can AI turn evil ?
A potential misuse of AI
Artificial Intelligence is shown as potential villain of the future. We have seen it depicted in Hollywood movies and most online forums. Is it really possible ? We know that history repeats itself hence we need to do some historical analysis and see if there is any future possibility. I will be sharing my thoughts on this topic and try to arrive at a conclusion. Let us see how....
Humans evolved through various stages of Development. When we were in the Stone Age we created some tools made of stones to reduce our efforts. We then created weapons for self defence and at times for hunting. It was a needed in those times. Weapons lead to wars. Now let us skip certain ages and see what happened in the Industrial Age.
In the Industrial Age we created Industries which lead to mass production of goods and helped speed up human development. But pollution increased multifold. The environment today is on the brink of collapse. We rushed Industrial Revolution without looking at sustainable Development. We were literate in most terms but not educated enough to understand this.
The recent one is the Information Age. In the Information Age we believed that information or data is more crucial. Hence we started hiding crucial information, we started gathering information and gaining insights from that. We also started sharing certain information at large using online platforms and web. Now we are witnessing the issue with polluted information and data. Now that internet cost is cheap we see people sharing invalid information and others sharing it without validating. Very soon people will start believing everything posted on WhatsApp and Facebook without intellectually or logically validating it.
Now if we evaluate the historical outcomes we could find that there are always some humans who will convert a good technology into an evil. Initially everything starts well with need and benefit but slowly its greed of certain humans which changes the face of the technology. We blamed humans for WARs and Pollution. Now humans are smart enough to start blaming technology before it's misused. Take an example of Artificial Intelligence ( AI ). We already started marketing the concept that AI can and will turn evil. Hence in future if any human misuses AI we can blame the AI technology and not the human who misused it.
Is it possible that AI can turn into evil ? We should hope for the best but prepare for the worst. AI is developed by humans and true AI is a complex feat to achieve. Although true AI may transform into evil but we do need to remember that the creator of such AI would be a human. We know the law of conservation of energy :
Energy cannot be created or destroyed but can only be transformed from one form to another.
Hence AI did not come into existence on its own, we humans are its creators. Hence we are responsible for any future implications. At least this time let us use this new technology effectively and go ahead with sustainable development.