Why The Machines Won’t Win – This is a story of human ambition.

I have been working on the bleeding edge of AI technology for more than 4 months now. I am working on a project that seeks to further the state of the art in conversational agents and I have been critically reading and critiquing research papers published in top tier conferences like NIPS, ICLR and AAAI. I state all of this to establish that I know what I am talking about.

Whenever I tell someone I am working in deep learning almost inevitable the conversation veers of to their fears of how they believe that technology is beating mankind, how this is the apocalyptic prediction coming true and some version of the suggestion that the progress we’ve made is good enough and we must slow down if not stop all together. A lot of this stems from the way AI advancements are portrayed by the media; ‘ Last bastion of human intelligence  falls’ , ‘Man vs Machine’, ‘How the Computer Beat the Go Master’, ‘The battle between humans and machines’.

What they do not tell you is that humans built the machine in the first place! So it is not AplhaGo that beat Lee Se-dol in the game of Go but the engineers at deep mind. This is a story of human triumph not defeat. There is no need for skepticism or cautious optimism we should be celebrating these advancements and welcoming them with open arms.

The machines are not out there to get you, these technologies are going to augment human ability as technology has been doing since the stone ages. Advancements in artificial intelligence make us smarter and more productive. Better search results help you find the information you need faster, more accurate speech recognition allows you to go hands free, more reliable machine translation helps you consume information that would have been outside your reach. Both technologies and humans are the most productive when their respective strengths are combined to give rise to an unstoppable force. Machine have memory, humans have experience; machines have precision, humans have compassion and empathy; machines bring the tools, humans bring the purpose.

These tools combined with human ambition, perseverance and the super power to dream big are going to open doors to worlds we cannot have imagined in our wildest dreams. So the next time you hear about an AI advancement (which is most definitely going to be tomorrow, given the crazy pace of development) instead of fearing it, think of how you can use this advancement to augment your efforts in making the world a better place.

Further reading:

Garry Kaspariv’s TED talk