Regulating the future

Regulating the future

Context:

• Alan Turing speculated in 1950 that around the turn of the century, it would be possible to make computers that matched the capacity of human brains, packing in about a billion neurons.

Why is in news?

• Alan Turning predicted that if these machines were pitted against a human interrogator in what is now known as the Turing test, they would end up fooling the interrogator into guessing that he or she was playing against a human contestant 70% of the time.
• It is now nearly 70 years since then, and neither has the Turing test been surpassed by any robot, nor have humans succeeded in creating artificial brains that have this capacity.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its implications:

• It is the challenge of programming the human adeptness to learn that is one of the most crucial challenges facing developers of artificial intelligence (AI) that could stand up to human competition.
• The ongoing rise of AI will also challenge the human condition, for example through displacement from jobs, threat of inhuman errors, and threats of hacking that can damage or even hijack the robot from its assigned duties.
• The 21st century has seen major breakthroughs in numerous fields such as gene editing methods that can, in principle, produce designer babies to robots that assist in surgery, computer programs that defeat humans at various games, drive cars, and write news reports.

Conclusion:

• Rather than respond with fear or suppression, it is time to start working on methods of regulation and moderation that can deal with the inevitable AI-human interaction.