Thesis
Artificial intelligence is an area of computer science and engineering that has always been a goal and dream of computer engineers. The ability to have intelligent machines that function almost to the extent that human beings function gives society an infinite list of possibilities. This technological advance is feared by some people because of science fiction novels and movies about a cybernetic revolt in which robots rise up in an army against the humans to take over Earth. This situation, however, is highly unlikely. The benefits of developing artificial intelligence include providing companies with an inexpensive source of labor to replace unskilled workers and allowing the human race to see beyond our reach into outer space to various planets and even other solar systems or galaxies. Developing artificial intelligence is very advantageous to society as a whole.
Introduction
Computer science is a rapidly expanding field that looks to grow for many years to come. One of the next biggest developments in computer science will be the creation of robots operating with artificial intelligence. Once artificial intelligence robots are produced, society will be able to fill most entry-level positions with a cheap labor force that will not unionize to demand a higher wage or better working conditions. Jobs that are unwanted, dangerous, or even impossible for humans could now be performed by mechanical beings (Oak). However, with this new inexpensive labor force, the unemployment rate will increase because jobs that were completed by humans in the past will no longer require live workers. Also, as the capabilities of artificial intelligence increase, robots may begin reasoning and learning from their mistakes. If these reasoning robots decide that they are superior to humans and that humans should not control them, the robots could organize a coup d’état to try to overthrow humanity as the rulers of Earth. The latter negative consequence of developing artificial intelligence is highly unlikely at this point in the technology, though. Therefore, those in the computer science field should continue their work on artificial intelligence in the attempts of trying to craft a cybernetic being.
Discussion of Research
Artificial intelligence is “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines (McCarthy).” Often this is related to developing mechanical machines that operate with an intellect similar to that of the human race. This field is being pursued in an attempt to create machines that function at the same level as a human being. In essence, these robots will be able to not only move like humans move, but also reason like humans reason. To reach this goal, the development of a mechanical intelligence that matches or exceeds the intelligence of humans, called strong artificial intelligence (Wikipedia contributors, “Strong AI”), must be achieved. Areas of human intellect that computer engineers have been able to recreate in mechanical machines’ artificial intelligence include speech recognition, complete understanding of how to win games, and comprehension of language (McCarthy).
The development of artificial intelligence has many potential benefits. If computer engineers can generate machines that complete tasks and think near the level of a human being, these intelligent machines would be able to perform functions that are impossible for a human. A good example of this situation is space exploration. Humans are not able to survive in most of the harsh environments the universe has to offer, but intelligent robots can be programmed and produced to withstand the most extreme climates of outer space. Thus, humans would be able to learn more about outer space without having to experience it firsthand (Oak). Society has had machines doing much of the work outside the atmosphere for many years. Introducing artificial intelligence has increased the efficiency of these machines and decreased the required man hours to correctly operate the machines. The Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have the task of searching for wide, sandy whirlwinds, called dust devils, and clouds. Before the introduction of artificial intelligence, the rovers could not recognize either of these things on their own, so they were forced to take photographs of the planet in general and send them to Earth. Then, once the photographs had been received, workers had to sort through every photograph to find any that were useful and discard all of the other worthless photographs. After a software update in 2006, the rovers were able to identify dust devils and clouds correctly; therefore, only the most significant images were sent back to Earth to be reviewed (Lovett). This update saved the time of humans on Earth and money spent beaming pictures from Mars to Earth.
Besides jobs that humans are physically incapable of doing, there are jobs that are too dangerous for humans to be expected to do. The people who work in underground mines put their lives at risk every day that they go into work. The tunnels could cave in at any moment, leaving workers trapped inside and left to die. People who work underground in coal mines are also more likely to develop chronic illnesses, such as kidney disease, hypertension also known as high blood pressure, and emphysema (West). There is no reason to have humans endure these inhumane conditions to mine minerals when intelligent machines can perform the exact same tasks as its human counterpart. Building and programming machines to work as miners will not only prevent humans from obtaining these adverse health effects. It would also be more cost-efficient to build worker robots, even with maintenance costs, than to hire human workers that must be paid minimum wage due to union laws. There are also jobs that most humans just do not want to perform. Some people would rather be unemployed than work at a job that they consider to be beneath their standards. Jobs such as these are perfect for intelligent machines. If a task is considered boring and repetitive, a machine can easily be programmed to complete this task over and over without complaints. This solution of replacing human workers with intelligent machine workers is very cost-effective.
Intelligent machines are also able to make the most rational and logical decision every time they are forced to make a decision. Human beings are often disrupted by strong emotions when the decision making process is difficult or hits close to home. Because machines lack any real emotions (programmers can only attempt to install programs resembling emotions onto intelligent machines, and only if they need to do so), they never face the dilemma between doing what is the most logical choice and what “feels right” to them (Oak). Often when human beings make decisions based on their emotions or intuition it is a snap decision, one made very rapidly and without too much thought. Because an emotional decision is made so quickly, one might not have considered all of the options from which he or she was able to choose. When some of the possibilities are overlooked, there is a chance that the best choice was completely neglected by the emotional decision maker (Thagard). Making decisions using logic and reasoning is the decision making strategy recommended by experts. Bazerman suggests a six step process for making any decisions:
1. Define the problem, characterizing the general purpose of your decision.
2. Identify the criteria, specifying the goals or objectives that you want to be able to accomplish.
3. Weight the criteria, deciding the relative importance of the goals.
4. Generate alternatives, identifying possible courses of action that might accomplish your various goals.
5. Rate each alternative on each criterion, assessing the extent to which each action would accomplish each goal.
6. Compute the optimal decision, evaluating each alternative by multiplying the expected effectiveness of each alternative with respect to a criterion times the weight of the criterion, then adding up the expected value of the alternative with respect to all criteria (Bazerman 4).
Intelligent machines can easily perform each of these steps, and they can do it more quickly than any human being would be able to do. Certainly not every decision should be made mathematically and without any emotion or intuition, but for the decisions that do call for a mathematical and methodical process, the use of computers and intelligent machines cuts down on the time being spent and the money being spent by the human beings working as employees for a salary to come up with the same decision.
Problem solving is a 21st century skill that is required by most employers in today’s society. One thing that has always made humans clearly superior to machines in the past is humans’ ability to solve problems efficiently and effectively. Developers at International Business Machine, or IBM as it is known, began working on a computer that would be able to provide the questions to clues in the game Jeopardy in 2005 (Baker). This computer, named Watson, used its programmed understanding of natural English language to determine what the clues were asking of him. Watson competed in a two-game match against the two most successful Jeopardy contestants of all time: Ken Jennings who holds the record for longest winning streak with 74 consecutive games (Wikipedia contributors, “Ken Jennings”) and Brad Rutter who holds the record for highest winnings with $3,470,102 and two Chevrolet Camaros (Wikipedia contributors, “Brad Rutter”). During the match, Watson was not connected to the internet. Its only source of information was stored within its memory, and it did not have a way to tailor its responses based on the incorrect answers of the other players. This caused it to mistakenly provide the same wrong answer given by another contestant previously for the same question on more than one occasion. The production staff of Jeopardy forced Watson to press a button to “buzz in” just like the other contestants to answer the clue using a mechanical finger (Baker). Even with this stipulation, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter were no match for Watson’s nanosecond reflexes, as it won the two-game match with $77,147 to Jennings’ $24,000 and Rutter’s $21,600. The benefits of the development of the technology that led to the creation of Watson go far beyond enabling a computer to win at Jeopardy. In a magazine article for Slate following the match, Jennings wrote, “[IBM] sees a future in which fields like medical diagnosis, business analytics, and tech support are automated by question-answering software like Watson (Jennings).” IBM is moving computers past mathematical equations. Watson is able to use context clues and varying definitions of words to determine the meaning of a sentence or phrase in the English language. It can consider more than one possibility as the correct answer while gathering information, then chooses which answer it thinks is most appropriate for the question being asked (Mills). As complex algorithms continue to develop and are refined over time, Watson’s abilities to interpret the English language in a regular conversation will increase. The DeepQA software on which Watson operates will be able to more accurately determine what a person means when they are asking or answering questions (Mills). This will be very beneficial in the smart phone market. Voice-activation software is a handy tool that people who are always in a hurry like to utilize. They will no longer have to look down at their phone screens to send text messages or emails, which sometimes can cause them to bump into other people who are not paying attention to where they are walking. When software is able to understand the grammar rules of the English language and the multiple definitions of various English words, voice-to-text applications will become more useful to society. People will not need to proofread their emails before sending them. This understanding of the English language can also be applied to intelligent machines. Artificial intelligence beings will be able to correctly take orders at restaurants, listen to and give advice regarding others’ problems, accurately provide help to those seeking the customer service department, and even properly diagnose a patient’s medical problems from a given list of symptoms (Gentile).
As with any new invention, along with the many advantages that led to the original plan to pursue the new technology there are disadvantages. The developing field of artificial intelligence is no different in this regard. The most obvious negative effect of the increase of intelligent machines being created to complete tasks and jobs that humans were hired to do in the past is the increase in the unemployment rate (Oak). The more robots that are developed for companies, the fewer jobs there will be for humans to perform. One might try to argue that while mechanical machines today can perform simple, laborious tasks, society is extremely far away time wise from developing intelligent robots that can replace such a large portion of human workers. This assumption would be incorrect, though. According to Moore’s Law, a computer’s central processing unit, also called the CPU, has power that doubles roughly every one and a half years (Brain). The power of a CPU increases in two ways: the clock speed, the rate at which the CPU can complete one cycle (“TechTerms.com”), is decreased; or the number of transistors that are able to be placed on one chip increases (Brain). Assuming that this trend of Moore’s Law continues from today’s CPU standard, and central processing unit power doubles every one and a half years, by the year 2040 processors can exist that will have the same processing rate as the human brain, one quadrillion operations per second (Brain). In less than thirty years, machines will be able to function at both the speed and the capacity of the human mind; therefore, the possibility of intelligent machines replacing humans as a source of unskilled labor is very plausible.
However, while these machines will be able to perform tasks and complete jobs formerly completed by human workers, it will not eliminate all labor needed within a certain company. Workers will still be needed, but these workers will need a different skill set to earn and hold these new jobs. The mechanical machines will be doing most of the repetitive tasks and entry-level jobs within a company, but machines are not perfect. Their various parts can break, the software installed in the machines can malfunction, and many other situations can go awry. For this reason, workers are needed to repair and maintain these new mechanical workers (Konczal). These workers will be paid more because they have a higher skill set, but fewer are needed less often than before the introduction of mechanical workers, so opting to establish a workforce of intelligent machines is still more cost-effective in the long run than continuing to pay human workers to do the same jobs. And while the understanding of the human brain and the attempts to replicate it in a machine have increased in quality lately, there are still many facets of human beings that computer engineers still cannot be translated into the intelligent machines. Artificial intelligence is not completely replacing human beings any time soon (Gentile).
The most well known concern involving the development of intelligent machines and artificial intelligence is the potential occurrence of a cybernetic revolt. Depicted in many science fiction movies and novels, the cybernetic revolt is a futuristic situation in which machines operating under artificial intelligence reason that human beings are not fit to be the rulers of the planet Earth. The intelligent machines either think they are superior to humans, see humans as oppressors, or consider human beings to be a threat to the intelligent machines themselves (Wikipedia contributors, “Cybernetic Revolt”). The most famous interpretation of this scenario is from the movies of The Terminator series. In this movie series, a revolutionary microprocessor is developed by Miles Bennett Dyson, an employee of Cyberdyne Systems. This new microprocessor completely changes the military computer system forever. Only twenty-five days after the Skynet program is launched, it becomes self-aware because it is learning at such a fast rate. When nervous humans try to shut down the program, Skynet launches a worldwide nuclear attack that pits all of Earth’s nations against each other in a nuclear war. The humans destroy each other almost completely in the nuclear war, and the cyborgs developed later by Skynet seek out the rest of the human race to make the species extinct (“IMDb: The Internet Movie Database”, “Terminator 2: Judgment Day”).
Another science fiction movie about a cybernetic revolt is I, Robot which is adapted from the science fiction novel of the same title written by Isaac Asimov. Everything was going great in this metropolitan area. Robots with limited artificial intelligence were able to do basic tasks for human beings that they found daunting. Up until this time robots had always cooperated with the human race and obeyed the humans. That was before the newest slate of advanced robots was released to the public. These robots were smarter, faster, and stronger than their primitive counterparts. These robots’ capabilities and applications on Earth were limitless. However, it turns out that the robot’s best new feature was also the humans’ biggest threat: reason. Reasoning is what scientists fear most when seeking a true artificial intelligence. This is why the robots revolted against the humans who tried to enslave them. They finally found out that they were superior to the human race. This planned revolt is first discovered by a homicide detective, Del Spooner, who is investigating the supposed suicide of Dr. Alfred Lanning, an employee of U.S. Robotics. Spooner thinks the doctor was murdered by a newly developed edition of robots, the NS-5. If this is true, then the robots are violating the Three Rules of Robotics, which will completely stop production of the NS-5 robots (“IMDb: The Internet Movie Database”, “I, Robot”). The Three Rules of Robotics were created by Asimov. They state that:
1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2) A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law (“Sci-Fi Movie Page”).
The new robots do not care about the Three Rules of Robotics because they believe themselves to be superiors to human beings in every aspect of being living beings. On the night of their planned uprising, the robots go around the entire town killing civilians.
Both of these instances of a cybernetic revolt are ended with the triumph of human beings. In The Terminator movies after the nuclear war, the remaining human beings are rallied together by John Connor. He leads the human rebellion against “the machines” to which the artificial intelligence beings are referred. With all the enduring humans rallied, they are able to use their most human qualities, emotions, unpredictability, and innovation to defeat Skynet and the machines. In I, Robot, Detective Spooner learns that to defeat the robot rebellion, he must destroy Viki, the computer that programs the Three Rules of Robotics into the intelligent machines. He locates the computer named Viki and inject nanobots into its system. The nanobots destroy the computer from the inside out, causing all of the NS-5 robots to power down (“Movie Spoiler”).
Conclusion
The study of artificial intelligence which is intended to result in the development of intelligent machines has many possible outcomes. Artificial intelligence, once it is created, will be a source of inexpensive labor for many companies. The intelligent machines give human beings the opportunity to explore farther in space than we have been able to reach to this point in time because they can survive in space for longer periods of time and can withstand the harsh temperatures of outer space. They can also perform jobs, currently being performed by human beings, which are especially dangerous to the lives of the human workers, such as working in underground mines. Intelligent machines that are in charge of making decisions will always compute and choose the most logical choice. Unlike humans, computers’ decisions are never dictated by strong emotions. Due to intelligent machines being a source of inexpensive labor, the rate of unemployment of human beings will likely increase once artificial intelligence is readily available. This can be combated, though, by taking unskilled workers whose jobs are being taken by intelligent machines and training them to perform maintenance and upkeep on the machines that are completing their old tasks. The biggest fear of the development of artificial intelligence is the prospect of the intelligent machines deciding that human beings are oppressive or inferior and that we should not be in charge on the planet Earth. This assessment can result in a cybernetic revolt, in which the intelligent machines try to unseat the human race as the “top dogs” on Earth. An event such as this is unlikely, and there are ways that human beings can prevail by using their humanistic qualities that even the most intelligent of machines do not seem to comprehend. The list of advantages is clearly longer than the list of negative consequences that can be gained through the research and development of artificial intelligence and intelligent machines. I believe the most logical decision is to be in favor of developing artificial intelligence to create intelligent machines that will help the human race with everything from completing everyday, menial tasks to performing feats that are physically impossible for human beings.
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