Artificial Intelligence, a sound so familiar to everyone these days that it has become a part of our culture and everyday life. In fact, AI has become so ubiquitous that we fail to notice their tranquil presence everywhere around us. From your smart phone assistant to the TX-GAIA (Green AI Accelerator), everything is governed by an AI program running in the background to make our everyday lives a bit easier to handle.
Now with the advent of AI making its way into most of the headlines everyday, what could be the future of AI? A question so perplexing that we often adrift ourselves in a reverie cup of imagination while finding an answer for it. Some of the most popular answer however lies within the sphere of “humans being replaced by machines”, a thought which may sound spine-tingling to many people who are in the peril of loosing their jobs for a machine and this is what I’ll be adressing here.
Generally speaking, Artificial Intelligence by itself is self explanatory on why it could never replace humans. As something which is artificial could never express vital emotions like love or hate. These emotions can only be expressed naturally through bonding and trust. Though venturing into this is an entirely different topic to explore with its own set of complexities, this is not my focus here. Instead, my focus here is on what would happen if humans were replaced by machines.
For years, there have always been some who fancy the idea of humans being replaced by machines as they believe that humans are not perfect. Yes, though that statement holds true and I do agree that we are not perfect as each of us have our own set of blemishes, does not mean that we should be replaced. As I’ve always had the supposition that even with our flaws humans and machines working together can achieve marvellous wonders in developing our society as a whole instead of replacing one another.
The thought that some people are striving to develop machines that can perform better than humans just to prove a point sounds absurd to me. As no matter how sophisticated a machine may get, human intervention should always be a predominant necessary while making decisions. Not saying that we need this human intervention so that we don’t end up in a word like from the movie terminator genesis. But these interventions are necessary to keep our values as human beings intact. Now, what are we without our values and beliefs? The gruelling answer is just a lazy clump of flesh and bones. This is because it is these values and beliefs makes us who we are and what we do in developing this society.
Most researchers from the field of Psychology agree that replacing humans with robots would strip away our core values and beliefs and cause a lot of disruption to our society as a whole. This is because, in time the population of humans being replaced by robots would feel inadequate to fit in this society by letting their flaws overpower them and eventually emanate them to have very disruptive behaviour. This will cause more harm to our society than good because according to the Committee for the Political Economy of the Good Society— without a stable society with all its members given equal values, democracy itself can fall. Hence, it goes without saying that, everyone should undertake a key initiative to establish human-centered AI (AI which works closely with human intervention) in every field to ensure a better future for our children and their children to come.