First of all, hit the play button. I have a beautiful piece of music for you guys. It’s good to have some melodious, calm music playing at background while we read. (Music increase our concentration, makes us smarter, according to ‘Mozart effect’, a very famous theory linking music and cognitive performance. But don’t worry, if you are smart already, it won’t make you oversmart.)

SOURCE

Today I choose to talk about Artificial Intelligence. So, let’s begin.
Artificial Intelligence, AI, is one of the groundbreaking development of 21st century, which certainly rise the pace of industrial revolution to new height. Our ancestors have been around for about six million years. The modern form of humans only evolved about 200,000 years ago. Civilization is only about 6,000 years old, and industrialization started in the earnest only in the 1800s. And the development has been on exponential form. If we make a chart of development, it will look like this:

Development of AI has a crucial role in forming this curve. So, let us point out some sectors where AI has aid us in today’s world:

Autonomous planning and scheduling:

It is the part of artificial intelligence, also known as AI Planning, which concerns mainly on realization of strategies. Have you heard of Waymo(Google Self-driving Car). In here in steemit also, a lot of bots ( @randowhale, @minnowsupport, @resteembot, @treeplanter etc.) are working to upvote, comment, resteem our post. These are all examples of autonomous planning and scheduling.

SOURCE

Game playing:

AI plays vital role in strategic games such as chess, poker, tic-tac-toe, go, etc. Strategy games, role-playing, actions, sports, simulations, adventure, puzzle games etc are some types of game playing by artificial intelligence. AI have started defeating human champions in various games (some examples):
In 1997, IBM Deep Blue defeat world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
In 2016 a system built by Google-owned AI company DeepMind called ‘AlphaGo’ beat South Korean champion Lee Sedol at the fiendishly complex game ‘Go’.
Lengpudashi is beating human teams in poker.(2017)
And very recent news about a bot from Elon Musk-backed startup OpenAI has defeated Dota 2 pros.

Expert Systems:

A piece of software which uses databases of expert knowledge to offer advice or make decisions in areas such as medical diagnosis, accounts, coding, games , etc. There are some applications which integrate machine, software, and special information to impart reasoning and advising. They provide explanation and advice to the users. Auto-correct in keyboard can be taken as the simplest version of expert system. Another example can be taken when we try to troubleshooting our computers, it gives us various suggestions.

Robotics:

Robots are able to perform the tasks given by a human in precise order. They have sensors to detect physical data from the real world such as light, heat, temperature, movement, sound, bump, and pressure. They have efficient processors, multiple sensors and huge memory, to exhibit intelligence. In addition, they are capable of learning from their mistakes and they can adapt to the new environment. Viz: industrial robots, automatic vacuum cleaners etc.

SOURCE

Handwriting Recognition:

The handwriting recognition software reads the text written on paper by a pen or on screen by a stylus. It can recognize the shapes of the letters and convert it into editable text. There are apps which can also recognize the shapes of letters from pictures and convert them to editable text. Try out these apps : Google Handwriting input, Text Fairy etc.

SOURCE

Speech Recognition:

Some intelligent systems are capable of hearing and comprehending the language in terms of sentences and their meanings while a human talks to it. It can handle different accents, slang words, noise in the background, change in human’s noise due to cold, etc. Voice commands are being popular nowadays. Text to speech, speech to text are some other examples. Best example would be Siri, Cortana etc.

SOURCE

Computer Vision:

These systems understand, interpret, and comprehend visual input on the computer. For example,
-A spying aeroplane takes photographs, which are used to figure out spatial information or map of the areas.
-Simulation and modeling of pilot training, automobile parts etc.
-Doctors use clinical expert system to diagnose the patient.
-Police use computer software that can recognize the face of criminal with the stored portrait made by forensic artist.

Surprize Package: Music playing in background (If you played it earlier, as I suggested), is completely composed by AI. You can also visit www.jukedeck.com for more musical AI.

Talking about the development on artificial intelligence, there are some shocking updates
I recently read, which carries a probable future of human existence.

"Facebook shuts down robots after they invent their own language," London's Telegraph newspaper reported. "'Robot intelligence is dangerous': Expert's warning after Facebook AI 'develop their own language,'" as London's Sun tabloid put it.

SOURCE

Actually, I felt the upcoming danger on human existence, because of our own creation. That's why I choose to write something about it. On the gaming sections, as I mentioned earlier, AI defeating human mind is, achieving a new steps in AI development. However, it also point out that, we are never going to be champions again in those games. We are creating superintelligence which can control our intelligence. We are creating AI with goals misaligned with ours. We are creating AI to compete with us. And if you think AI can't control us, think about the lion in circus. We are not controlling them with our strength. We are controlling them by being smart. And same goes to the AI. It can surely control us.

SOURCE

Also think about the human intelligence. There is some limits, our brain, has some fix size, fit in cranium. Whereas, AI can be of any size, it can be a size of a small CPU or some large mining factory. Also, an information on one machine can be easily transmitted to others, but we humans can’t possess such power.

“I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish … just keep an eye on what’s going on with artificial intelligence. I think there is potentially a dangerous outcome there.” –Elon Musk

“I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.” – Bill Gates

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” – Stephen Hawking

Humans now control the planet, because we are the smartest one, not because we strongest, biggest or fastest. If we developed AI, that outsmart us, what will happen? We are making AI smart, but we don’t know how will they behave after being smarter than us. They are made to aid us, but we don’t know which way they will choose to aid us. That may be devastating.
For instance, we plan to build an large research center in middle of the forest. We will have to cut down trees to clear the area, animals living in that forest will have to move. In same way, when AI has made some goals for achieving some job, there is much probability of destroying our human value, because they are currently made only to accomplish some jobs, given to them without thinking about what human need in actual.
I have made a chart showing the probable future of human existence:

And this is coming soon, since, it is predicted that, AI will gain superintelligence by some decades later. It's time to think hard about it. If we don’t think about it now, we will be ending our existence in this century or will be living as pet to AI, just like we pet cats and dogs.

Conclusion:

Artificial Intelligence today is known as weak AI/narrow AI. Long term goal of research on AI, is strong AI/general AI. While narrow AI can defeat humans on various tasks, games, strong AI will outcast us on every cognitive task. The goal of AI should always be for good of human society. We can create superintelligence for sure, but do we really need that? Or we can create superintelligence, can’t we create superintelligence which value human’s existence.

SOURCE

A pottery artist is designing an vessel. He can give any shape as he want during the process, while clay is soft. However, once it’s complete (Solid), if it is not made as he thought, he can only destroy it or throw it away. We are creating AI, and we still possess power to create AI, as we want. So let's create an AI, which will be trustworthy friend to us. We are here to shape our future, not to destroy it.