The Role of Humans in Artificial Intelligence:
Fascinated as I am by the potential for machines and humans to drive human progress forward, I am not an AI expert, but follow closely many of the developments on the topic that appear in our “media funnels” everyday.
There are quite a few people, very smart people, having very public discussions about the potential for AI to overtake humans. Ray Kurzweil, one of the world’s greatest thinkers, wrote about the coming of The Singularity, in his 2005 book.
Elon Musk, has warned of an unregulated AI being a bigger threat than N. Korea, although Gates and Zuckerberg disagree
In reading this NYT story about AI-Research being done out of Stanford, what struck me as significant was the amount of human-involvement required to classify the 50 million images gathered from Google Street View.
“But first, a database curated by humans had to train the A.I. software to understand the images”, according to study lead, Timnit Gebru, who now works for Microsoft Research.
The Stanford Researchers recruited “hundreds of people to pick out and classify cars in a sample of millions of pictures.” Once the machines knew what vehicles they were looking at, they could flex their binary-muscles and work much faster than the team of people.
This is but one example of how machines & people can work together to drive our society forward…and I cannot help but wonder if the machines do start to misbehave, can we not just hit the off switch or pull the plug?
Scott Turner