Three years ago, on the order of the day conference on transatlantic topics, there was a question of AI. I already thought about skipping the meeting because the case was for my interests, but the beginning of the presentation detained me.
The reviewer described a computer program, which will soon become a trigger for international champions. The machine, the referent said, is training itself: it plays games, understands its own mistakes, and accordingly improves its algorithms. Indeed, after this presentation, an AI program called AlphaGo played the world’s most important player.
As we think about education, we always try to ease this process. We have services with college paper help if you need some advice or a good start with your assignment. However, some countries ban such services as they may influence students’ growth. This prevention is strange because students tend to use such services to find some free time or if the task is tedious. There’s always a chance to create exciting assignments and reform the educational process, and stop blaming services that help students.
The entrance that most memorably changed today’s history was printing. The search for empirical knowledge has led to the emergence of liturgical scholarship. Individual learning and scientific discoveries replaced faith as the main criterion of human competence. We systematized information in libraries. The age of reason led to today’s order of the world.
This structure is now undergoing a major revolution in technology. This can result in a computerized world based on data and algorithms rather than ethical and philosophical norms.
The Enlightenment has tried to confirm the truths handed down from generation to generation to an integral and analytical mind. The goal of the Internet is to codify knowledge through the collection and processing of vast amounts of information. Human knowledge loses its character. Individuals become data; data become a scale.
Internet users prefer simply receiving information and manipulating it instead of understanding its meaning in interconnections and structures. Notes on history and philosophy are rare. They are usually looking for something for immediate practical needs. Searches algorithms can provide preferences for specific clients and make them available to third parties and their political or commercial goals. The truth becomes a matter of opinion. Wisdom risks being drowned in information.
In social media, the number of people who think about things is growing. Many technophiles even want to get into the Internet from illiteracy, which they are so afraid of. This weakens the strength of will, which is necessary for forming solid beliefs. Creating such ideas is a self-couraging endeavor, but it is the essence of creativity.
This influence of the Internet on politics is particularly striking. The ability of algorithms to keep the most minority groups in the field of vision depreciates the current focus on general political priorities. Policymakers focused on such new priorities no longer have time to focus on the public’s eye.
The orientation of the digital world only on the pace galvanizes reflexivity, wants the radical instead of the deliberate. Its values are created by the consensus of other groups, not by self-control and cognition. The accumulation and analysis of large amounts of information open up unbelievable possibilities. The most important of them is AI, which can solve complex, positively abstract problems through processes similar to the human mind.
This goes far beyond conventional automation. It achieves clearly defined goals by its division and mechanization. The AI comes out of the end, sets its purposes. Since their implementation depends on the factors that the AI creates at first, its systems are inevitably unstable. They are constantly in Russia because they spend the whole time registering new data, analyzing it, and then analyzing themselves on this basis.
In this way, AI develops the abilities that were previously characteristic only of people. It makes strategic decisions about the future partly based on predetermined data (e.g., computer game code) and partly based on self-determined data (the AI itself plays the game millions of times and learns simultaneously).
Thirdly, though it could achieve the goals set, machine learning would be too indifferent to explain the reasons for this. In some segments, such as recognizing human behavioral patterns, it can already show better results than humans. And by increasing its computing power, it will be able to evaluate complex situations and optimize the options that allow for them. An individual intellect, perhaps, can do it in a way that is insignificantly or, not excluded, very different from the way humans do it.
Throughout history, civilizations have always wanted to explain the world to themselves: in the Middle Ages religion, in the Age of Enlightenment by reason, in the twentieth century by writing history, in the twentieth century by ideology. What will happen to our knowledge if the machines override the ability of people to understand and they can no longer understand the world created this way because they will not be able to interpret it in their terms?
How can we recognize intelligence in a world where machines reduce human experience to data and measure it with the parameters of their automatic data memory? Who is responsible for the activity of the AI and its mistakes? Is it possible for a human-made legal system to keep up with machine learning if it successfully drives people into a corner and outsmarts them?
Moreover, the concept of “AI” can be misleading. Indeed, these systems can solve complex problems, which until now have only been the domain of human perception. What makes an AI unique is not its ability to think like a human but its ability to think faster. Moreover, it is unique in its unprecedented ability to think and understand. Because of this advantage, the AI wins any game.
This is not about winning but about the reflection and wisdom of life. Suppose we now classify the purely mathematical processes of AI as thinking and try to quantify it or accept its results without verification. In that case, we risk losing competence, which has been the essence of human cognition.
The implication of this development has recently been found in the AlphaZero program. It plays checkers at a previously unreachable level. Self-directed, AlphaZero took only a few years of experimentation to reach the level of mastery that chess players would need fifteen hundred and fifty years to achieve. In her were programmed only the basic rules of the game. Neither human intervention nor human-generated data were part of its self-learning process. If the program could reach such a level so quickly, where would the AI end up in ten years? What effect will this have on our perception of the world? What role will ethics play in our development, which mainly means making better decisions?
These questions are left to IT specialists and controversial branches of knowledge. Philosophers, who used to report on the formation of the world order, are out of the field through the marriage of expertise. The world of computer specialists is enchanted with technical possibilities, and the developers are dazzled by their muscovite commercial prospects. Both of them are eager to widen the borders of the tangible than to understand them.
Suppose they are interested in this topic at all. In that case, politics is more concerned with practical possibilities in the security sphere or special secret services than with transforming the human condition to which machine learning is beginning to lead us.
Enlightenment began with philosophical insights spread by new technologies. Our time is going the opposite way. It has created a potentially domestic technology that is searching for a leading philosophy. Other countries have declared AI a national priority. The U.S. has not yet done so. This is about to change.
The developers of AI, who are as ignorant of politics and philosophy as I am of technology, need to put the issues discussed here in front of them to find technically possible answers. The United States Administration should form a committee of thinkers to formulate a public visa. One thing is clear: if we do not do this, we will not be forgotten.