Artificial Intelligence vs No Intelligence

So I was at a conference the weekend of February 9–10 called Connect IT. It’s a Ryerson University-run conference that focuses on the topic of the year. Last year’s conference was about the rise of Fintech in the financial industry, and this year was about Artificial Intelligence, and like every other innovation, there’s danger.

I’m as excited for artificial intelligence to make a scratch in society as you are really. I’m a business student, know nothing about engineering or tech, but the keynote speakers really went into it. Artificial Intelligence is really cool! I can finally act like Joaquin Phoenix in his 2013 film ‘Her’, and not act like a creepy dude sleeping with their phone in bed (wait, don’t we all do that now?). It’s incredible. It’s not like how everyone was attracted to voice recognition nearly 7 years ago, Siri’s old already. No no, Artificial Intelligence will really be in everyone’s life, and actually have AI as their only friend.

The speaker, Geoffrey Hunter from Tribal Scale, was talking about how AI and voice recognition will be like one day. Instead of us demanding devices like Amazon’s Echo to tell us how many grams of sugar should go into a chocolate cake or tell us the weather tomorrow, it will read our minds, watch our routines, and understand our everyday lifestyle.

Side note: The government doesn’t watch us like people think we do, cameras and voice recognition devices only record the latest 3 seconds, and if the device doesn’t hear the words “Ok Google” or “Alexa”, it destroys the recording of you talking. So no, don’t listen to the memes that are going around the internet nowadays, you’re fine.

McDonald’s planning to destroy a few thousand jobs in a few years

Anyways, going back to how amazing AI will be. It will get to the point when you’ll be working in the office, finishing up the presentation, and when a particular time hits (your self-proclaimed clock-out) the AI device will say something like, “Hey Phil, great presentation, but since you’re pitching this to the CFO of Apple Inc., you might want to elaborate more on the fourth slide on what costs need to be reduced for the next fiscal period.” Nobody except for your 4th-year professor in college will give you recommendations like that, and that 4th-year professor wouldn’t even have the time to recommend that to you, so checkmate.

It’s the next big bang, just like how touch-screen phones came out in 2007. But, as I said before, it will be a danger. I’m not the only one who remembers the beef between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk on AI over Twitter. That was like Meek Mill vs Drake in the geek industry! The Zucc was all for AI and wanted to accept it to society tomorrow, whereas Elon(gated) Musk(rat) knew that something will happen, after him seeing one of his self-automated Tesla’s crash. Who’s right and who’s wrong? Neither.

AI is coming, and we won’t be able to stop it. As much as some love it and others don’t, it’ll be entering our lives for real soon. There’s a question we have to ask ourselves: Once AI robots will join the society, like human-like robots, will we accept them as a whole, or start a revolution or war with them? These aren’t robots we can just switch off, they have a mind of their own. And take this into thought, if a powerful country like America couldn’t accept non-whites only 50 years ago, how will we accept robots to be our friends? This is where the danger comes in, and war may even be elevated in this. It won’t be like World Wars I and II, rather a Cyberwar (since North Korea and America will destroy 99% of the world by then).

You can comment that I’m crazy and stupid and don’t have the knowledge needed to type up this article. You’re probably right. I did mention I’m a business student, not the next tech mogul. I’m just writing my thoughts, and it’s great to share my thoughts with everyone. I’m just saying that there is a danger in AI. I will be the one who will probably purchase whatever Google or Amazon or Apple will release with AI features, I’m not going to disappear off the face of the earth and only consider my toaster as “technology.”

Anyways, back to the conference. There were two case competitions that my team and I had to present which we didn’t win at all, but that’s alright. I gotta applaud the team for hosting an incredible event though, I really can’t wait for next year’s conference to happen as well. And thank you for the food, I devoured 3 sandwiches (limit was 1 per delegate).

As a recommendation to my readers, I do want to say that you must attend conferences like these that are happening around the city or country. Find them on campus if you’re a student, or check out tech meetups on meetup.com, there’s always something for everyone on there too.

With that, here’s another article from me! Thanks so much for reading, please share and spread the word of Phil, I’m learning as you all are.

Till next week, cheers.

Artificial Intelligence vs No Intelligence was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.