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Rene St. Cyr's avatar

Isn't the Genie out of the bottle? Can it realistically be controlled? There are many nefarious and unethical people out there.

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John Bruner's avatar

'Artificial intelligence' is presented to us as an adjective and a noun. The noun gets all of the attention, but understanding the adjective is most important in evaluatiing how to deal with it. Human intelligence is based on sensory inputs from multiple modalities (e.g., light, sound, etc) over the period extending from infancy into the experiences of the rest of life. Conditioning, learning, memory, recall, analysis, and expression are all involved in the behaviors that we eventually describe as intelligence. Artificial intelligence is created rapidly by literally dumping whole libraries of information, including both fact and fiction, into readiy searchable memory banks. Humans analysze and respond to events in real time influenced by external events and internal states such as motivation and emotion. Computers programmed for AI, on the other hand, perform a statistical analysis of the words most likely to occur next in the stream of words already used. Humans must react continuosly to multiple sources of change occurring in the environment in real time. AI computers respond to new words entered into the system at a later time. This only begins to sketch the differences between human and artificial intelligence. Humans amalyze and evaluate situations, computers statistically analyze word sequences. In an emergency, which will you trust?

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