Ethical and Social Implications (Continued)
Many only think about how human life could be affected with the emergence of AI, but it
is also crucial to recognize that we would have to set laws on how artificially intelligent
machines would treat each other. There is a scene in the Spielberg film, A.I., where robots are
shown fighting against each other for the enjoyment of the humans, but as one journalist puts it,
“civilized society shows contempt for animal fights that are set up for human entertainment…
sentient machines that are potentially much more intelligent than animals should not be made to
fight [each other]”(Hutan, 2015) and crimes committed by robots towards robots would be an
additional issue that’d have to be regulated.
Future Use
In the future, technology experts hope to use artificial intelligence for good, gearing their
abilities towards the medical field (allowing AI machines to compute diagnoses by searching
through all of their installed medical knowledge) and jobs such as assembly and financial
advising (where their computing abilities would far surpass the human potential). There are a lot
of jobs for middle-class workers that are easily replaceable by computers, which is another major
concern for the public as far as the ‘take over’ of the robots. Gates, in discussing the progress of
AI, said, “Once computers/robots get to a level of capability where seeing and moving is easy for
them then they will be used very extensively” (Holley, 2015). Not only can robots soon become a
less costly employment opportunity for businesses, but they may soon be much more efficient
than humans, lacking the obvious human qualities that can slow people down or distract them.
The fear, in this case, may be how many jobs AI machines will confiscate from the human public
and, as they keep advancing, will employment continuously dwindle till we are faced with an
entirely new work force? We could be seeing an “AI device that matches the processing power of
a human brain within 12 years” (Gross, 2014), which means that there’s far more ahead of us
than we can truly imagine.