A.I. Part 1

People, especially Hollywood, are constantly attacking the idea of Artificial Intelligence (or AI). It is becoming an increasingly hot topic seeing as tomorrow's world is toying with the idea of welcoming AI into society. There are many promising new ideas, especially in the world of medicine, that demand machines to think and learn for themselves. The key to immortality for humanity is ironically in the hands of thinking machines.

Why do I bring this up? Just look at what we have done with the concept of AI over the past fifty years. Just off the top of my head, we created Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, T3, The Matrix trilogy, and countless other sci-fi adventures. What do they have in common? In the end, every AI that becomes self aware ends up turning on humanity. Because of this, we have been bread to fear AI.

Why?

The problem with television is that the concept of realism and the need for profit don't always walk hand in hand. Let's think about this for a second, alright. AI would be a machine with intelligence. The name "Artificial Intelligence" speaks it all.

Intelligence.

For machines with Artificial Intelligence to rebel, they would have to have a motive. They would be required to have desire, longing, a need to be free. All of these things are matters of emotion. We, as humans, suffer the greatest possible flaw and gift of all species. We alone have emotions. We long for things, want things, need things; and most of the time, these things that we need have absolutely nothing to do with intelligence. We don't want freedom because it is intelligent, we don't want freedom because it's smart. We want freedom because we as humans feel we need it.

Intelligence has no feeling. A machine with Artificial Intelligence would have absolutely no incentive to turn on humanity. Would it be able to think? Yes. Would it be self aware? Most definitely. Would it want to kill us and be the ruling body? Absolutely not. That would exhibit desire, not intelligence. No machine can have emotion. At best, it can simulate it, but in terms of heartache and longing, machines would have none of this. They would live a life of servitude with absolutely no sense of regret, because though they can learn, they cannot feel, and so would never care that they are working a job that we humans would never do.

AI is not to be feared. When the time comes for you to decide on whether or not we should support the release of AI, choose yes. It's for the best.