by After reading a lot of literature about robots, artificial intelligence, and the future of our world’s technology, it is clear that many experts are predicting for AI to be able to exceed human performance in many fields in the future. While this idea can be scary to many, with the potential for AI to take over the human race, as discussed many times by Elon Musk, this led me to the question: What aspects of life will artificial intelligence never be able to exceed humans in. North American artificial intelligence experts predict that AI will be able to exceed humans at everything in 74 years, while experts in the field from Asia predict that this will occur in only 30 years. With the ability for AI to replace many human jobs across the world, I wanted to think about what humans are capable of that AI will likely never be fully capable of.
As we know, humans are complex and creative beings. Since our first days on Earth, humans have interacted with their environment while using creative thinking in order to invent tools to survive. Humans are capable of using their creativity and imagination in order to think outside of the box, and create ideas that nobody has thought of before. This creativity and imagination aspect of humans can not be replicated in artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence follows rules that are decided by the creator. Artificial intelligence is able to use past observations to learn patterns and then use those patterns to make predictions about future occurrences. While AI is extremely powerful in a number of ways, it is confined based on the creator’s rules and its observations. AI lacks the creativity that humans possess, and therefore is not capable of creating new ideas and inventions from scratch like humans are able to with the use of our imagination.
In addition to the creativity that artificial intelligence lacks, AI lacks other characteristics that humans possess such as judgement and values. While artificial intelligence is able to make decisions based on data and observations, this is not true judgement. Humans make judgements based on their values which are gained from life experiences. While AI experiences the world so differently than humans, AI is not capable of having true values. Instead, they act based on data and the rules set out by their creators. An example of this is a self-driving car. Imagine a scenario where a self-driving car has two options, to save the passengers of the car, or to save pedestrians walking on the street. For humans, their judgement in this scenario would be based on their values and morals. For the AI self-driving car however, it could not possibly utilize values and morals in order to make a proper decision. If it did, this judgement would be based on the values of the creator of the AI, not the passengers of the car. While there are many ethical concerns regarding self driving cars, the lack of ability for passengers to make judgements in situations like these is frightening.
While artificial intelligence is extremely powerful and has the capability to replace a number of tasks traditionally done by humans, I think that there are a number of characteristics that humans possess which could never be replicated in the form of artificial intelligence. While the future of AI is certainly scary for many, I believe that due to the complex beings we are, possessing creativity and many values which we learn by living, artificial intelligence will never be able to fully replace humans. Instead, I envision a world where humans work alongside artificial intelligence, weighing on each other’s strengths in order to work the most efficiently and in the most moral ways.