It’s really amazing to see how many science fiction stories from the past have become our reality in the present. In The Machine Stops, E M Forster presented a world that looks very similar to that lived by Facebook users. Or take the seashells (earbuds) from Fahrenheit 451, or video chat from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those stories aren’t even a century old and, yet, those technologies would have seemed impossible to imagine being part of our real lives just a couple of decades ago.
Fast forward to the present and we now not only have this advanced technology readily at our fingertips, but we’re using artificial intelligence (AI) to drive much of our daily lives.
There are, however, many world-renowned scientists who continue to speak out openly against AI and the dangers of giving it so much power. Elon Musk told a crowd at MIT that, “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like — yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out.”
Stephen Hawking has similar reservations: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”
But this isn’t a matter of famous scientists telling us not to use AI; after all, Hawking himself relies on machine learning technology in order to communicate with others. What this boils down to is control and moderation — and that’s exactly what we’re seeing in the latest forms of automation and sci-fi gadgetry.
Without embracing these new forms of technology, we’d be missing out on the major strides they afford us in terms of connectivity, productivity, and basic improvements to our overall quality of life. Then there are those sci-fi gadgets that are so new that we know there will be amazing benefits to come from using them once the general population adopts them.