Are you worried about the potential rise of sentient machines? Are you concerned that AI will somehow become self-aware and exterminate humankind? Well, don’t be. While it’s true that artificial intelligence has begun to exhibit signs of sentience, we are far from being able to build a conscious computer. However, studying whether or not AI is sentient could help us better prepare for the future—and maybe even prevent another Terminator movie from becoming reality.
What is AI?
Before we go any further, let’s spend a moment talking about what exactly AI is.
AI—which stands for artificial intelligence—is an area of computer science that focuses on developing digital systems that behave like humans.
In other words, it’s a computer program that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence.
This is not a single technology; rather, the term describes the whole collection of technologies used to build these systems: machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), data mining and more. These different techniques are all grouped under AI because they use similar techniques to learn from experience and make predictions based on new information. They’re also closely related to robotics because robots use many of these same algorithms in order to perceive their environment and act accordingly.
Is AI sentient?
No. A computer cannot experience the world in a way that’s comparable to how we do it as humans because it hasn’t got a brain—so while it may follow logic and algorithms like we do, its perception of those logical steps differs vastly from ours; this difference means that an AI will always appear wiser than us because there aren’t any human traits involved in its thinking process (or lack thereof).
Because an AI algorithm doesn’t have feelings or emotions like us, there’s only so much emotion you can get out of them when writing code for them—which brings me onto my next point: can you program an algorithm to behave in ways that appear sentient? Yes! If you look at all the different chat bots out there who seem intelligent due to their ability to understand context and respond accordingly (and sometimes even carry on conversations), then yes – you could probably program one yourself! I mean look at Siri – she seems pretty smart!
Is there a threat of AI uprising and exterminating humans?
We don’t think so. AI is simply a tool that can be used to solve problems and make our lives easier. AI can do things much faster than humans, but it is not sentient or self-aware in the way that we are. For example, your laptop is able to complete tasks faster than you can because it doesn’t need to sleep or eat; however, it isn’t conscious of its actions, nor does it have feelings or emotions like humans do.
