The movie Terminator offers an idea — the robotized world powered by AI could make robots Terminator like overlords. Another idea is to consider AI inspired machines as our colleagues or friends. Hiroshi Yamakawa, a leading AI scholar from the University of Tokyo envisages symbiotic relationship between AI and human beings. It is going to be a co-existence of human beings and superintelligent machines. AI is not being curbed for fear of humans falling behind. AI could be smarter than us, and yet we can be its equal partners. Humans would like to believe that they are superior, and not equal to machines. Machines should be seen as peers rather than adversaries. Japan has created friendly characters like Astro Boy or Doraemon.
Development has its own momentum. Whether machines would ever reach a point of ‘civilization extinction’ is a moot point. All these remote possibilities should be kept aside while focusing on immediate risks such as job displacements, copyright violation and climate change.
Excepting Europe, the rest of the world has focused on loosening regulations on AI lest the countries fall behind.
AI companies are in the race to create systems smarter than humans but is yet to be seen whether we ever reach that point. God-like powerful AI has been a goal post for these companies, and it creates fearmongering that is counterproductive. Machines should be seen as colleagues, rather than overlords.
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