John McCarthy, father of Artificial Intelligence, our future ....

 John McCarthy, 1927-2011, the father of Artificial Intelligence did his BS from Caltech, PhD from Princeton and worked mostly in Stanford University. He was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist.

He along with others, coined the term “Artificial Intelligence,” and invented the first programming language for symbolic computation, LISP (which is still used as a preferred language in the field of AI), and invented and established time-sharing. His main research in the field involved the formalization of commonsense knowledge.

Simon, McCarthy, Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude E. Shannon coined the term "artificial intelligence" in a proposal that they wrote for the famous Dartmouth conference in Summer 1956. This conference started AI as a field.

While AI has been improving, the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT has been a game changer. ChatGPT is a conversational application of GPT-3, the most powerful AI system in the world, allowing you to have a natural conversation with this powerful technology.

Can AI plan an invasion and take over the world? Absolutely not. AI cannot have a vision or purpose on its own except someone designs it that way. It cannot design itself that way (through deep learning) because deep learning is to improve the efficiency of what the AI was designed for. Humans are territorial in nature, meaning we like to feel in control in order to feel safe. If something is unknown to us, and therefore outside of our control, like AI, then we fear it.

How can I not be left behind in the modern era of AI ? Learning the relevant programming languages and tools will be beneficial. Python is the most popular programming language for AI, it's one of the hottest languages going around, and it's also easy to learn! Python is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language with dynamic semantics.

Existential risk from artificial general intelligence is the hypothesis that substantial progress in artificial general intelligence (AGI) could result in human extinction or some other unrecoverable global catastrophe.

AI will never replace human intuition (click here for Forbes aricle)    

Late Stephen Hawking, however had a different point on AI and its impact on humanity. 

Impact of AI on humanity :

74 year old theoretical physicist, late Stephen Hawking, author of the classic, "A Brief History of Time", Professor and Director of Research at Centre for Cosmology at University of Cambridge has highlighted three catastrophies to befall planet earth in the next one hundred years and finish off human domination.

First catastrophe is the proliferation of artificial intelligence robotics. Imagine a world where humans would be coexisting with AI robots in the era of general AI. Imagine the disaster that would befall humanity then.

In Hawking's own words, "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete (with these self-proliferating machines) and would be superseded". Artificial intelligence powered autonomous weapons like "autonomous armed quadcopters" could be a big threat to humanity.

Second catastrophe as Prof Hawking predicts is the arrival of aliens from outer planets. Either they come with better intelligence and better weapons and technology to conquer mankind and see its elimination or are less intelligent and hence not much of a threat, would depend on how well we are prepared to meet such an eventuality.

The third catastrophe to befall planet earth in the next hundred years is the uncontrolled proliferation of atomic weapons resulting in a global war which will ensure the end of life on planet earth.

Prof. Hawking also talks of global warming  and genetically mutated viruses as the other two imminent and dangerous threats staring at mankind, if we do not come out with a global concerted action plan to combat these threats facing mankind as a whole. Click here for the BBC interview with Prof. Hawking on these threats..

Let us hope the potential of AI is harnessed effectively in the right direction and measure so that AI instead of spelling the doom for mankind will be beneficial in the long run.

George