Chief Prognosticator

Don’t Be Afraid of Artificial Intelligence

I just read a great article titled Chess Bump — The triumphant teamwork of humans and computers. It was written by William Saletan and is available at Slate.com and in the Washington Post. The main point of the article, written in the light of the recent overtaking of computers over humans in chess playing ability, can be summed up with the quote:

Don’t be afraid. We, too, are getting smarter, and computers are a big reason why. They’re not our enemies. They’re our offspring—our creations, helpers, and challengers.

You see, it’s not computers which are actually beating humans at chess, but the humans who write computer programs that beat humans at chess. Computers (and all great achievements in technology) are not better than us, but instead the tools which are making us, as the human race, better. Saletan sees human evolution as a three part play:

In the opening, humans evolved through engagement with nature. In the middle game, we projected our intelligence onto computers and co-evolved through engagement with them. In the endgame, we merged computers with our minds and bodies, bringing that projected intelligence back into ourselves. The distinction between human and artificial intelligence turns out to have been artificial.

Take a look at my interpretation of how computers will help humans reach unimaginable levels of knowledge, understanding and intelligence: