Should We Be Worried About Artificial Intelligence? What Does History Say?
The musical robot band designed by Ismail al-Jazari in the 13th century CE. Image from Wikipedia
BY JAMES CONRAD
From ancient times, mankind has envisioned automation in the form of machines being trained to save labor. According to the Lie Zi text, in the 10th century BCE, a mechanical engineer known as Yan Shi presented King Mu of Zhou with a mechanical humanoid figure that could sing in tune, posture and much to King Mu’s displeasure, attempt to woo a lady. In the third century BCE, the Greek inventor Ktesibios improved the design of the water clock so that the water level did not need to be maintained. In the early 13th century CE, Ismail al-Jazari, a mathematician from Mesopotamia, created a device consisting of a floating boat with four automatic musicians designed as entertainment for parties.
The 19th and 20th centuries saw even more sophisticated advances. In the 1820s, Charles Babbage designed the difference engine, a machine that would calculate algebraic functions. In 1896, the American businessman Edwin Votey invented a pedal-operated piano that could play music by means of a paper roll with precise perforations instructing which key should be pressed. In 1912, a Spanish mathematician called Leonardo Torres y Quevedo built one of the first autonomous machines capable of playing chess.
In 1950, the British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing devised a test he called the imitation game, which proved a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. In order to pass this test, the machine was required to use natural language and reason as well as possessing knowledge and ability to learn. Five years later, the term “artificial intelligence” was used in a study proposal submitted by John McCarthy from Dartmouth College, Marvin Minsky from Harvard, Nathaniel Rochester from IBM, and Claude Shannon from Bell Telephone Laboratories.
Alan Turing
Fast-forward to 2023, and artificial intelligence is as ubiquitous as it is increasingly sophisticated. It has made our lives easier in a seemingly infinite number of ways. Through the utilization of machine learning, artificial intelligence has facilitated communication, transportation, meteorology, navigation, commerce, access to creative content, security, the regulation of fuel and water consumption and many more things.
In an article from Forbes.com dated 27 June 2019, Fei-Fei Li, Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University declared, “I imagine a world in which AI is going to make us work more productively, live longer, and have cleaner energy.” Despite the grim speculation in the Judas Priest song “Metal Gods” and movies like Maximum Overdrive, RoboCop and the Terminator series, in 2014, top AI researcher Oren Etzioni wrote: “To say that AI will start doing what it wants for its own purposes is like saying a calculator will start making its own calculations. A calculator is a tool for humans to do math more quickly and accurately than they could ever do by hand; similarly AI computers are tools for us to perform tasks too difficult or expensive for us to do on our own, such as analyzing large data sets, or keeping up to date on medical research. Like calculators, AI tools require human input and human directions.”
Nevertheless, other experts have taken a less enthusiastic view of AI-based technology. In an interview with the BBC, the late British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking warned, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”
This photo of Stephen Hawing in zero gravity is amazing! Photo by Jim Campbell for NASA
Even Alan Turing expressed concern about the evolution of what was to become known as artificial intelligence. During a lecture given in Manchester, England in 1951, he stated: “It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage, therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.”
Most recently, on 29 March 2023, an open letter from the Future of Life Institute called for pausing development of systems able to compete with human intelligence. The letter, signed by current Twitter CEO Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang, specifically states: “Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”
A wild ass robot. Photo by Possessed Photography
Over seventy years forward from Turing’s prediction, there have not been any accounts of any sentitent machines proactively seeking out humans and coercing them into slavery. Deaths as a result from AI have also thankfully been few and far between, and mainly taken the form of industrial accidents, such as when 25-year-old Robert Williams was fatally struck in the head by a malfunctioning robot at a Ford automobile plant in Michigan in 1979. On the other hand, the perennial concern from the beginning has been that working people could be displaced by machines, with perhaps the biggest sore point in that regard being the increasing ubiquity of self-checkout machines at major grocery and big-box stores, which primarily exist specifically so that the powers that be at the corporations can reduce, and ultimately eliminate, their manpower cost.
Another problem with AI comes in the form of a smart home equipped with a stove, furnace and water heater each powered by gas but also attached to an electronic AI gadget designed to regulate energy consumption suffering a loss of electrical power. Naturally, this would leave the person living in that smart home without heat, hot water and the means to cook food. Even more worrisome is the possibility that a hacker could access the devices in a smart home via an unguarded wireless internet connection and play havoc with them. Such a thing indeed happened to families in Wisconsin, California, Illinois and Texas during a period spanning December 2018 to September 2019.
These specific incidents underscore perhaps the biggest problem with artificial intelligence. Machines are only as smart as the people who build and program them. As thorough as the research, design, building and testing of AI machinery may be, there is the off chance that an extenuating circumstance may arise, causing the machine to function irregularly or not at all. Similarly, if corners are cut during the programming and manufacturing process, erratic events are bound to happen. It could be as silly as a Waymo self-driving Jaguar cutting a pedestrian and his dog off at the crosswalk, or it could be as tragic as a workplace fatality. In that case, the concern is not the technology itself, but whether or not the hands guiding that technology possess competence and foresight.
What do you think? Should we be worried about the future of A.I.?
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