“Machines will overtake humans” “Machines will rule us” “End is near”
With the advent of the latest technologies like Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and many more, people have been forced to think that these technologies will affect us adversely and we have to stop all this.
There is no question that we all have a moral obligation to protect humanity but at the same time, we need to see these advancements from a different perspective too. Obviously, new technologies provide us with an opportunity to either use it positively or negatively. Even Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atomic bomb) had regret of using atomic energy against humanity despite the fact that it had (and still has) a lot of possibilities to be used for humans. Ultimately, it is our responsibility to use these technologies with good intent. We can take the example of Software – they have simplified the processes in the sectors like Banking, Automobile, Finance, FMCG, Space, etc. but at the same time we see many cyber-attacks, Ransomware attacks, cyberbullying, and whatnot.
Coming to the technologies, the term AI or Artificial Intelligence has faced the most backlash from those who are against such advancements. But we need to keep in mind that a lot of such technologies are still in a nascent stage and their use of them to annihilate humanity seems too farfetched. In fact, we can use them to discover the untouched and unexplored knowledge of space, science, and history.
Moreover, these technologies have already started to prove their worth by helping people with daily tasks, enhancing security, complex medical operations, etc. We can easily see tasks like autocorrect in smartphones, face detection to unlock smartphones, self-driving cars, Assistants like Alexa and Siri, and advertisements on social media platforms based on searches done by you. Without any question, we need a screening system in place to monitor the misuse of these technologies and that’s where the policies like GDPR come into the picture. However, there is a lot of work to be done in this direction but stopping the use of the technologies with take us nowhere.
To conclude, this is the time to embrace technological advancement with the intent to use them for humanity and not against them.
Raghvendra Pratap Singh