Artificial Intelligence is here to stay and prosper

When natural intelligence is not enough the Artificial Intelligence comes to rescue. Whether we want it or not, the manipulation of the human genome (improvement, of course) will go on, even if for fixing the medical problems and other deficiencies only.

And Artificial Intelligence will continue being developed and will control our lives more and more. 

Take the fighting against terrorism using drones, for example. Today, the decision about the strike is made by a human. But the drone operators make mistakes (they are humans!), and innocent people got killed. It was reported several times already that such mistakes and even correctly executed strikes put a heavy moral burden on the drone operators. Naturally, there are software systems being developed that help humans to avoid mistakes. It is also reasonable to expect that fully automated decision-making blocks are being tested already and produce quite promising results. 

As soon as a drone with decision-making block demonstrates that it does much fewer mistakes in a long series of tests, who would be against removing humans from this highly stressful duty? That is how we are going to come to our voluntary yielding of power to a robot in making the most important decision – to kill or not to kill a human being.

Similar systems are developing already to help judges in sentencing. And there are systems that make much fewer diagnostic mistakes in medicine. As soon as they prove to be much more reliable than humans, they will be used in a fully automated mode. That is how we will – eagerly!  – entitle a robot to make life and death decisions and many more other decisions humans are making today.

Such systems will broaden their reach and eventually start deciding – automatically! – who is going to be born and who should… well… clear the space under the sun to the new member of society. The criteria “to be or not to be” will be probably based on the usefulness. To whom? To the goals the society pursues (survival is the highest priority, of course) and to those who control the decision-making computers. I hope that the goals setting will never be fully automated, but who knows.

So, children, study well at school, so that you may become either the leaders of society who control the machines or, at least, the programmers who create and maintain these machine and can “advise” them that YOU are very useful for the society.

By the way, in order to exercise its awesome power, AI needs Big Data. And who owns the most of data today? It seems that the answer is, Google. That is why we should not be surprised to hear that Google buys all the AI developing companies they can put their hands on.