AI Is Too Dumb For Us

TIME Magazine Article

By: Jack Wilson

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Everyone is getting scared of AI. Big names like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have warned us about the dangers of AI. One thing most people are worried about is their jobs. They think that AI is just around the corner from replacing them. But is there really something to be scared of? When robots got stronger and more precise than humans, they replaced us on the assembly line and automated factories. Many people think that the same is going to happen when AI take over. However, two things show us clearly that AI won’t take over our jobs: AI isn’t smart enough, and AI isn’t creative at all.

For AI to take over our jobs, it has to be smarter than we are. While AI that can beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov at chess or automatically find a drug to cure a disease may seem smart, it really isn’t (Dormehl). When AI plays chess, all it knows is the chess pieces, the chessboard, and the rules of chess. It doesn’t know anything else and cannot apply its strength in chess to any other situation, even a similar game like checkers. Same with the auto-drug discovery AI. It discovers drugs through image recognition and pattern finding, which has little or no use in any other application (Howard). This shows us that even those examples in which AI seems much stronger than humans, they may not present any danger we even need to consider.

In addition, there are examples in the field of AI that are considered the forefront of AI development, all of which use “deep learning.” Deep learning is a program that learns abstractly, the way a human does, and can get a very high rate of accuracy in what it is doing. While this sounds good, the best examples of deep learning can only recognize pictures and play the simplest of video games — clearly not a threat to our jobs. As Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab researcher Michael Luo points out, “AI is very limited in what it can do” (Luo).

In order to be a threat AI would need to be creative in what it does. While any algorithm may be able to calculate and find patterns in spreadsheets, AI lacks the creative element required to find a new kind of pattern by looking at it from a different perspective. For an AI researcher, even imagining how to make AI creative is impossible (Dormehl). Thus, jobs that involve creativity, such as designing, inventing, and art will all stay in the hands of humans. Even more so, many current jobs are service jobs, with human interaction, such as doctors/nurses, caretakers, counselors, police officers, teachers, etc. AI has been notoriously bad with social intelligence (Dormehl). For example, while AI may be able to teach more efficiently than a human teacher, humans, with the “human touch,” will be able to help students and introduce material in a more friendly way.

All in all, AI isn’t smart enough, isn’t creative enough, and isn’t socially intelligent enough to be able to take over our jobs. The best of AI can only recognize what is in pictures and play simple games, and no AI has learned to understand humans and become creative. All this goes to show that our jobs are ours for now, tomorrow, and the foreseeable future.