Robots will soon match humans in creativity, emotional intelligence
Robots will soon match humans in creativity, emotional
intelligence
By Andy Meek, BGR November 9, 2018 | 10:44am
As if we didn’t already have enough to worry about when
it comes to artificially intelligent machines being able to perform many tasks
faster and better than humans can, potentially stealing our jobs in the future
and presenting what some technologists worry is an existential threat to
humanity, now it appears AI will soon be able to match humans at being, well,
human, too.
An Australian AI expert, Toby Walsh, said during the
Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney recently that he thinks AI will learn and
possibly match human traits like creativity, emotional intelligence and
adaptability in less than 50 years. And Walsh — a Scientia Professor of
Artificial Intelligence at UNSW Sydney — predicts robots will be as smart as
humans by the year 2062.
But don’t worry about them ultimately presenting some sort
of threat or something as drastic as potentially wiping out mankind, he adds.
“We’ve been rather mislead by this idea that the robots are going to take
over,” Walsh told Time Out. “The robots have no desires of their own, they do
exactly what we tell them to. I’m much more worried about incompetence than
malevolence – that we’ll get the machines to do something and we haven’t
thought carefully about how it’s going to interact with our complex world …
Healthcare, transport, how we manufacture things, how we educate ourselves, how
we go out and play — it’s going to touch almost every aspect of our lives.”
It’s interesting to think about this other side of
increasingly smarter machines and to ask questions about the fundamental nature
of consciousness and emotion. These right-brain characteristics of being human,
things like creativity and emotion and the like — we like to think they will
save us or somehow set us apart from machines that are radically smarter,
faster and better at us in other things. But if they eventually get to be as
creative as us to complement their already stellar analytical capabilities,
what then?
When Walsh says he’s worried, though, it’s not about what
the machines will do. It’s us he’s worried about. Mankind, he says, needs to do
a better job of creating machines and AI systems that are aligned with our
values now.
“The only hope we have to deal with all these wicked
problems like climate change, increasing inequality and the ongoing refugee
problem, is if we embrace technology and use the world’s resources in a better,
more sustainable way,” he told Time Out. “The future is a product of the
decisions we make today. Society shapes technology and technology can shape
society.”
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