AI Myths to Ignore

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The advent of AI has created quite a stir for years. Though generally beneficial, we must admit that there’s still a lot more that we don’t know about AI. It’s this fact, the knowledge of there being a lot that is still unknown to us, that causes us to be a little skeptical about the whole thing; maybe even fearful.

Fear is justified as long as it’s warranted. However, what’s not justified is fear borne out of ignorance and, unfortunately, there’s a lot of fear surrounding AI that’s completely unwarranted and purely based on myths. In this short blog post, we are going to list out a few AI myths that you would do well to ignore.

No more jobs for humans

The biggest rumor doing the rounds about AI is about how it’s going to take over our jobs and leave hundreds and thousands without a job. This myth is the result of people (even experts) conflating AI with other technological innovations such as machine learning, robotics and big data.

Let us clear this up once and for all. Automation isn’t AI. In fact, it’s not even intelligent. Automation is something we’ve been doing for centuries and that’s constantly caused a shift in the job market, but people still seem to be working, right?

The reason we have workers still working in factories, despite efficient machines running the show, is because we created jobs that require the human touch. So, if industries out there aren’t creating jobs to replace the ones that have been automated, automation shouldn’t be getting the blame. It’s the industries and the job creators who need to find a solution.

AI and Robots are the same

This is another myth borne out of ignorance. Robots and drones are not artificially intelligent machines that can think for themselves. They are programmed to do exactly what they do. The same goes for pretty much every other machine out there – they are all programmed devices.

AI is evil

First of all, we cannot quantify or truly define evil and, therefore, tagging a machine as evil is just going too far. Unfortunately, this is what happens when you watch The Terminator or The Matrix one too many times. The closest we’ve come to badly behaved AI was with Microsoft’s TAY. That being said, it only turned evil because it was fed with negative information. AI is developed by humans and is, therefore, subject to the limitations set by humans. At the end of the day, we still have control.