If you’ve ever watched a sci-fi movie that deals with robots in the near future, you already know how the storyline goes. Robot takes over dull chores that everyone hates doing. Eventually, they get tired of being the help, and help themselves to the world but overthrowing humanity in various different and evil ways – at least, until a hero comes along to save the day.
In reality? Well, not for a good while yet. The truth is that AI is still pretty dumb. While it can handle any task you throw at it and program it to do with ruthless efficiency that makes humans look incompetent (and therefore useless) by design, that’s all they’re really good for – and they are vulnerable to hacks, malfunctions, and a whole host of other thing.
So, we can rest easy for now. While the common narrative goes that developments are speeding up and robot AI is becoming more and more useful – carless drivers, recognizing speech and images (and emulating real people conversations), even beating the world’s best chess and go players – we’re still a long way from the dystopian future nightmare, even the idyllic lazy lifestyle before that.
What really separates man from AI is the ability to think. If we, as humans are presented with a problem, we get out there and we solve it. A robot can only do that if its programmed the right way with some very specific parameters.
Every time you load up a marketing tool to help speed up the worst, most boring parts of your job, it’s great. But that’s all it is good for. You can’t ask a social media chatbot to suddenly start coming up with a smart email marketing strategy based on the data you’ve collected (well, there might be an API for that…). It just isn’t designed to function like that. It gives customers what you tell it to give customers, and then hands them over to a real human when the customer is asking awkward questions the bot can’t understand.
This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to make these kinds of robots and AI. The speed of technological development is breathtaking, and the day isn’t too far off. But how much advancement is truly needed for all of this comes to pass?
The answer is that nobody really knows. What makes our brain unique is that it somehow works in this incredible, organic way to be the most powerful computer on earth. Sure, you personally might not feel like a brainbox, but compared to current AI tech, you’re 100,000,000 Einsteins mixed with a dash of Hawking for good measure. Feels good, doesn’t it?
But never say never. We just don’t know how advanced this can get in the future, because many of the (human) discoveries that would lead to this situation have yet to be invented, perhaps even thought of.
In the meantime, we should be happy about this. Right now, we’re in an era where the technology is truly helping us with no threat. Sure, it could work better, but when it shaves hours off your work week and lets you achieve lots more without having to pay someone else for this enhanced productivity, do you really care?
There’s a lot of things that could go wrong in the future – but right now, there’s a lot of things going right. So rest easy: the AI bot nightmare probably isn’t going to become reality any time soon.