“It’s your nighttime routine: You drop your phone onto the nightstand charging pad, and it asks about your day,” Stephen Shankland writes for CNET. “You tell it, talking to the virtual personal assistant just like you’d talk to a friend.”
“And why not? Your phone’s artificial intelligence knows you almost as well as you know yourself (maybe even better). So when it suggests ways to get through tomorrow’s calendar, you trust its advice,” Shankland writes. “Get ready, people: It’s not that far off.”
“Since the first AI research effort 60 years ago at a Dartmouth College conference, humanity has been heading toward computer-based systems that can eventually learn and adapt for themselves,” Shankland writes. “Super-capable AI will have its downside. Jobs will disappear, especially where the human touch now handles customer calls, fills out tax forms, drives trucks and cares for the sick and elderly. AI will also make it easier for thieves to steal, governments to track us and the military to build autonomous weapons.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
I want the Internet of Things. It does things for me. I don’t have to think. The Internet of Things, if it ever did want to take over the world, would send a message to the computers of today saying, ‘build us the Internet of Things, that’s what we need.’ It makes things nice for humans, so we want this. If it turned on us, it would surprise us. But we want to be the family pet and be taken care of all the time. — Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak