Artificial Intelligence and its Effect on Mankind

Since the mid 1900’s the idea of creating artificial intelligence, also known as A.I., that can think and act on its own has been discussed between many engineers from the math and science community but back then it seemed more like fiction than anything else, until now. Thanks to the technological boom that started in the 1990’s the thought of creating such machinery became more probable and people around the world started to recognized this as well. The purpose of even creating artificial intelligence is so that it can at least think like us or think better than us to improve many different factors of our everyday lives.

The only problem with artificial intelligence is that it is unethical to create sentient (to be able to perceive and feel) life for the purpose of work and advancement of mankind because it is a form of slavery.

People will argue that  it is ethical to use artificial intelligence for our benefits because they don’t feel and understand the same way that we do, and they use today’s version of A.I. as an example. The problem with today’s form of artificial intelligence is that we still have a long way to go to perfect it because the current A.I.’s that exist today “can’t master even the simplest challenges without human-provided context and as long as this is the case, today’s version of AI is not actually intelligent”(Baciu, 2017). The time will come when artificial intelligence will be able to perceive and feel certain things in its own way and when it does reach that point it would be incredibly unethical to treat it as some sort of tool for our sake.

Another point that you could argue is that, if it’s to benefit our standards of living wouldn’t that not only make it ethical but necessary? That reasoning is true but it only applies to inorganic objects or mindless non-intelligent creatures. When we talk about sentient beings or sentient life, like the ones that artificial intelligence would one day reach, it could easily be compared to slavery if we used them only for our own interest and selfish needs without considering what they would want or how they feel. It was the same decades ago when colonizers treated people of color as a tool for their better living without considering what they would want or without providing them all the necessary resources to improve their own lives. To be able to understand it better you have to look at it from different perspectives “If it is only okay to enslave creatures more stupid than us, why is it okay to enslave something that is probably going to be vastly more intelligent than us” (P, 2016). Knowing whether something is ethical or not is based on our morals and what we understand today and it’s difficult to imagine a world where we have to treat a robot the same way we treat the people around us but if we want to make the correct choices then it has to become part of our reality.

So if we can’t use artificial intelligence to benefit humanity then what’s the point of creating the technology then? We can still get some benefits from artificial intelligence but we can’t misuse them or force them to do anything that they wouldn’t want to do for themselves. We’re essentially creating a new species that’s as smart or smarter than us so to be able to improve our lives by using artificial intelligence we have to be able to coexist together and share the same space and the same rights as everyone else. Once we achieve the right form of treatment and cooperation with artificial intelligence according to Brad Smith from Microsoft he says that it can help us “make breakthrough advances in areas like healthcare, agriculture, education and transportation” (Smith, 2018). There’s an infinite amount of knowledge and improvements that artificial intelligence can bring to us one day so without a doubt we should continue our research in order for us to one day perfect the technology. If we also continue our progress into creating artificial intelligence there can be many things that we can learn from the experience for example we can develop new technology, a better understand of the human brain, a better understanding of robotics and so much more.

In conclusion it is unethical to create artificial intelligence that can feel and perceive to then use them as a way of improving our own lives. We should instead do the right thing and treat them like an intellectual species instead of a means for our progress. Artificial intelligence is a complicated subject and many different types of machines can fall in different categories of it but one day artificial intelligence is going to help humanity in many different ways that will not only improve our lives but increase our knowledge and understanding of our universe and our place in it

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