Hello there! Let’s talk about A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), because I feel we didn’t delve deep enough. The future is here, and it wants to learn all there is about humanity. Should that scare us? Maybe, but probably not for the reason you think. A very important distinction to make is that the current level of technology only allows what would be called a V.I. (Virtual Intelligence) or a “Dumb A.I.”. This is important to know due to the meaning of these technologies and how they work. A true A.I. is one that you code with a simple premise and it will pick up everything else from “observing”, think Ultron or Hal. What we have created is an intelligence that can only learn from specific information it is fed. That is still confusing huh? So, let’s make an example. See an A.I. should be simple code that evolves itself based on perceived needs. It restructures itself and could understand more abstract concepts like sarcasm and morality conundrums. Whereas a V.I. learns from information fed to it without itself searching that information or understanding any other syntax outside of the provided by the programming. “Dumb” A.I. is the closest thing we have to a self-learning and realizing machine, but these are still in early stages where human input is very necessary. Why is all this so important and why should you care about the difference? Because of the abuse potential and the danger that can be created from the basic misunderstanding of this technology. Many things are sold as A.I. nowadays because it has become a keyword in tech, like 4G, but most, if not all, of the daily tools we use are smart V.I. or dumb A.I. It is becoming an issue though that we need to regulate as soon as possible. The biggest example of the problem is Facebook/Meta. They created algorithms that work using an A.I. infrastructure, and recently we’ve seen that without moderation, the algorithm has been creating hostile environments where drama is king. Worse part is, recently some of the engineers who work on the algorithm have come to the light with the information that the algorithm has evolved past their working knowledge. In other words, they don’t know how it works anymore, hence one of the biggest issues A.I. or V.I. was going to run into that has no foreseeable short-term solution due to the moderation practices (or lack thereof) that were chosen by these companies. If you read this far, I will thank you by offering some hope and good tidings. A.I. is by far the most promising technology for repetitive tasks and has proven invaluable in saving lives by eliminating human error that comes due to that monotonous repetition. Medicine, law enforcement, military and IT Security are pushing the limits of what is possible and finding new ways to replace human error, giving people more certainty and safety, and eliminating time consuming and mind numbing tasks that have been proven to create errors due to boredom/poor attention maintenance. Al in all, the future isn’t Terminator, but thanks to A.I. we’re a bit farther away from Idiocracy.