Local opinion: AI fears aren’t new, but today’s technology raises old questions

There’s been a lot of focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI) of late. And this past week has shown an increase in concern over the subject, leading to what appears to be panic. Although I have some dread, I also feel a bit amused about the drama surrounding the subject. The concept of AI is hardly new.

My first experience with the concept of and initial investigation into AI was at the State University of New York (SUNY New Paltz) in1981. They were putting together their first computer science program with the guidance of Poughkeepsie’s largest employer, International Business Machines (IBM).

The class I was referring to that had an AI focus was a robotics class where we built and programmed a small robot to move around the room, and the robot had to determine the size and dimensions of the room, and calculate and operate within those boundaries it had determined. The hardware was mostly discrete circuitry, and our programming structure was in machine and assembler languages. For nerds like us, it was one of the most fun we could have in a learning environment.

(Keep in mind that this was way-y-y before home computers. And what you have on your phones would fill one floor of a high-rise with a large mainframe computer system and another floor of direct access storage devices (DASDs) and reel-to-reel tape storage units for memories. These storage units are comparable to your flash drives today.)

We were all aware of the concerns regarding the development of AI and AI Systems. Those concerns were reflected in the movies of the time, like “2001: A Space Odessey” which highlighted ‘HAL’ (heuristic algorithmic learning). This allowed computer systems to solve what were considered complex problems, simulating coming to a conclusion and determining an action.

As we continued our learning, we crossed paths with other areas of study. “Colossus: The Forbin Project” was a movie of an example where the computer(s) actually learned to ‘think’. In the movie, the computer systems decided that man was his worst enemy and took action to secure man’s safety against himself. This is actually the model system that AI is being driven to emulate.

We had many intellectualized and what-if type of conversations and arguments about the reality of useful functions of AI in computer mainframes, robotics, and androids. The discussions were mostly academic, as we did not have the hardware or other technologies to realize those goals. Then came LSI (large-scale integration) of chips forming microchips, embedded coded language, miniaturization, and the internet. Now a ‘mainframe’ can pull information from any source, and with the processing speeds it is now capable of, it can analyze, assess, and conclude what actions are to be performed.

We now come to the movie “M3gan”. With high-speed miniaturization hardware, faster programming structures, and the internet, we can accomplish AI faster than we would know how to control it. Simply, AI is an ‘artificial thinking unit’ that is capable of acquiring information from multiple sources and synthesizing that information into a conclusion to determine which action to perform.

The greatest problem is still that it is what was with us 60 years ago. “Computers do what you tell it to do, NOT what you want it to do”. That is a reality born out in the movie “M3gan”. How do we build guardrails that would reflect our moral constraints? We have faced these fears before. Assisted suicides are an example. Another would be artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization. (Can we or should we modify human DNA before birth?). The actions of an artificially created intelligence may prove to be nothing humankind would want to face. “The Terminator”. Science fiction becomes science fact?