SEPTEMBER 2018CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8n old Chinese proverb says, "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now." This seems to be the thinking of very smart people when it comes to doing something about protecting humanity from the possible dangers of artificial intelligence (AI). Sure, it might be 20, 50 or even 100 years before AI becomes more intelligent than humans, posing an existential problem for today's sapiens. Many luminaries like Elon Musk, Bill Gates and the late Stephen Hawking have warned that failing to prepare for this eventuality will guarantee our demise in some decades to come.Perhaps we can start by noting that advances in artificial intelligence will not stop. That genie is out of the bottle. Billion-dollar AI companies are now being created in the proverbial "garage" throughout the world. For those of us who grew up watching The Jetsons, their flying cars, and Rosy the cleaning robot, AI is just a fulfillment of the promise science and technology made to us many years ago. Like any other tool, AI will be used for good and for bad, except that at one point these machine-based minds will become self-aware and decide for themselves what to do­good and bad. But the question is whom they would do for? One huge problem we humans have is our almost guaranteed inability to predict the future, even for those things we are creating. For example, no one ever predicted the smart phone with its hundreds of thousands of apps. Humans are just terrible at predicting anything that is not a linear, such as exponential growth. AI progress is currently moving at exponential speed. To put this in perspective, my old high school teacher would tell the tale of the king who was so thankful to a chess player who saved his daughter the he promised anything. The player asked for one grain of rice on the first square; two grains on the next square, and double one after that. Thus, he had one, two, four, eight and sixteen in the first five squares respectively. How many grains of rice would the king have to give the man? The answer is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (about 41,168,602,000 metric IN MY OPINIONWill Artificial Intelligence Destroy HumanityADAVID TAMAYO, CIO, DCS CORPORATION?
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