🧍🏻‍♂️ Can AI Replace Humans?
Issue 45— Technology
Artifical Intelligence has been evolving at an insanely fast pace over the recent past! From the introduction of Apple’s assistant Siri released in 2010, all the way to the present where we are surrounded by this technology through our phones, apps, etc. Companies like Google and OpenAI continuously evolve and grow their AI resources through advanced research and training. Even Tesla is making a robot called the Tesla Bot, which is also powered by AI. All this rapid evolution is amazing and all, but it raises a real concern: will AI be able to replace humans? And that’s what we’re going to be discussing in this article, so I hope you enjoy it!
My Stance
At this point and for the foreseeable future, no, I don’t think that Artifical Intelligence will have the capability to replace us. Of course, it might happen in the future many decades down the line, but it’s not much of a reality. There are three reasons that I believe that humans being replaced won’t happen: the creative, emotional, and economic aspects.
The Lack of Creativity
To understand the creativity aspect, we need to understand the fundamentals of AI. To read more about the fundamentals, I recommend you check out my article on what AI is at this link. AI can be generally defined as a machine that is programmed to simulate the behavior and thought process of a human. To achieve this outcome, it has to go through its learning stages through supervised learning or unsupervised learning. This means that the system goes through a lot of data from its training models which was most likely work done by humans. AI can enhance ideas and help people understand more about a concept or topic, however, what it cannot do is create new ideas and have original ones. Machine Learning is a branch of Artificial intelligence that focuses on how humans learn, and how to replicate those into an algorithm. This process is about gaining a lot of data that's already there and absorbing it. An analogy of this would be a student going through grade school. The student absorbs and learns data, and the teachers are there to train and help them learn that data. New concepts and discoveries are usually taught to them but are not learned on their own. However, humans can uncover and learn new ideas for the first time, and we must be still working and continuing to evolve the world’s knowledge base.
Emotional Understanding
Something else that AI is just not good at is understanding people and their state of emotions. Imagine this: you come back home from a funeral of a loved one, and then you have an AI bot say “I’m so sorry for your loss, please accept my condolences”. This just doesn’t do anything for us. At the end of the day, AI is just a computer program, and it makes us feel and think that the bot said that without any heart, feelings, etc. AI could potentially help us deal with stress, finding ways for us to feel better, but it ultimately doesn’t have the presence of a real human. When we’re near a loved one, we find a sense of comfort, security, happiness, and qualities like that because of their character. An AI bot can have things that it’s good at, but it doesn’t feel like it has a personality since it’s programmed a certain way, and it’s fed the data of many other people’s styles. The main reason that we feel emotions is through hormones like dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, etc. These are released when we feel certain emotions, but when computers have emotions it’s just through some code and training data.
Economical Aspect
The last reason why I believe that AI won’t be able to replace us is due to economic factors. Tesla is one of many big tech companies to be working on an AI robot. Elon Musk said that the goal of this robot is to perform boring, repetitive, and dangerous tasks. This sounds good in theory because it just improves our quality of life, but for it to do all these things, it will probably come at a steep price. Elon hasn’t made it formal or anything, but he’s said that the Tesla Bot is going to cost less than a car and that it should start at less than 20K. I mean at the end of the day, that’s an expensive robot, and to have a fleet of these would be great, but it would also cost a lot of money. Plus this doesn’t even factor in the ability to do other general things. Repetitive tasks are particularly easy because you are kind of going in a loop a couple of times, and these are probably boring tasks. Dangerous tasks are probably those that will need some training and practice to get through, and these may take longer to implement. However, the Tesla Bot most likely won’t be able to perform a lot of tasks that we humans can do with our speed, efficiency, and ability to figure things out.
Where are we at right now?
Currently, we are progressing very rapidly and developing new AI technologies. Right now and for the future though, it’s hard to see AI replacing us because they’re still developing, and because of their computational limitations. I think that even in the future, long down the road, it’ll still be necessary for us to stand alongside AI because of its limitations. I also believe that governments and other organizations will eventually put limits on these new technologies, and limit what they can do. We are already seeing measures put in place like the United States issuing an executive order for safe, secure, and trustworthy artificial intelligence.
Thanks for reading this article and I hope you learned something new. You may have different opinions and takes on this topic, and I’d love to hear them in the comments below. Other than that, I’ll talk to you next week!
— Luke Rapaka
