Vancouver Sun – Whether we should fear future “robotic overlords,” job-killing technologies born out of artificial intelligence and automation, will really depend on who is building them and what they’re building them for, according to AI developer Tom Gruber.
Gruber, co-creator of Siri, the voice-command AI feature on Apple iPhones, told the audience at TED Talks that we have a choice to create “humanistic AI” that can enhance human abilities and help people solve problems, not simply take over from them.
“We can choose AI to automate and compete with us,” Gruber said. “Or we can use AI to augment and collaborate with us to overcome our cognitive limitations, so we can do what we want to do and do it better.”
TED Talks, underway this week in Vancouver, tackled the topic of just what artificial intelligence and robotics can achieve for society and how to address problems that might come with that, such as increased unemployment, across a couple of its sessions Tuesday.
Some of the ideas that emerged from the 12 discussions held out incredible promise for innovation, but they’ll require new ways of thinking about work and income distribution if computers and machines take over a lot of jobs that people do now.
Gruber’s talk, in the session titled “robotic overlords,” focused on how artificial intelligence is being used to bridge communication barriers for people with disabilities and augment the abilities of professionals with object-recognition technology.
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