As artificial intelligence continues to advance at a rapid pace, technology moguls and influencers across the globe have been sharing their views on what impacts are to be expected.
With the progression comes a whole series of questions, which Telegraph readers have been sending in their multitudes.
Many are concerned how artificial intelligence will change the nature of their work, and whether it will make certain jobs redundant. Others question how society will change, and indeed what the advancement of AI might mean for human life on earth.
The Telegraph’s technology editor, James Titcomb, has answered the most pressing of readers’ queries about AI and what it holds for the future.
Read on to have your questions about AI answered by our expert, and please share any additional questions in the comments section below.
The Telegraph’s technology editor, James Titcomb, responds:
“AI is clearly making rapid progress in some areas, but remains fairly basic in others. One of the problems with the term ‘artificial intelligence’ is that it makes us think of these systems in human terms.
“The reality is that in some fields - arithmetic, for example - machines have outperformed us for decades; in others, they are nowhere near. Emotions fall into the latter: we haven’t really built AI that exhibits anything close to an emotion, partly because we don’t really understand how they work in living things.
“There are certainly AIs that scan faces and voices to detect emotions, which have been used by police and marketing companies, although their effectiveness has been questioned.
“For now, it’s probably better to think about AI in terms of individual capabilities than comparing it to the human brain. In some areas, such as generating images or summarising text, it is improving quickly, although these changes tend to come in fits and spurts, rather than improving gradually.”
James replies:
“For now, AI still can’t do a lot of things we can do, so it’s unlikely that we will be left behind any time soon, but experts do have some ideas about how to manage its rise.
“One is that we should ban AI from writing computer code to develop AI. This would prevent a phenomenon known as ‘recursive self-improvement’ where a system repeatedly improves itself until it outsmarts humans and then becomes all-powerful.
“Another emerging research area is known as AI alignment: ensuring that a robot’s goals are in line with ours. It is hoped that this would prevent famous doomsday scenarios where an AI is given a straightforward task - cleaning up the oceans or creating paperclips - and ends up destroying humanity as a side effect.”