The Reasons Artificial Intelligence Should Be Regulated

Artificial intelligence has both positive and negative attributes. That being said I believe that AI should be regulated. This is because though AI helps us in many ways such as cleaning houses and building things in factories, it still has the possibility to go haywire.

Artificial intelligence is intelligence showed by machines which normally is only affiliated with human minds, such as learning and problem solving. AI was first studied in Dartmouth College in 1956 by Arthur Samuel, John McCarthy, Herbert Simon, Marvin Minsky, and Allen Newell. They programmed computers to think strategically and that were capable of learning the strategies involved for the game checkers, as well as algebraic word problems. The Department of Defense was largely funding the US’s research of AI in the 1960s. Simon was saying that soon machines would be doing any work that humans could do. In the mid-1970s funding for AI was hard to come by and AI projects were becoming scarce. That time was called the AI winter. In the following decade AI research had its up and downs, but in the 90s AI was used for multiple areas including logistics, and medical diagnostics to name a few. By the 2000s machines were now out performing the best players at strategic and critical thinking games. Some types of AI include medical, automotive, economic and financial AI.

One way AI differs from the human brain would be that it is a lot harder and time consuming to apply commonsense to a computer while it is natural for people. In addition, computers began to lag as reasoning problems became larger. Overall, I believe that AI can progress endlessly. The only limitation would be our limitation. One reason that artificial intelligence should be regulated is because it is constantly taking more and more jobs from more and more fields.

Oddly enough, in the area AI is having a large impact and expected to have worldwide transformation effects is more talked about by economists than by the actual AI creators. There is plenty of evidence that the cyber revolution, which began with the large-scale use of computers and was greatly sped up by the establishment of stronger AI, is taking over many jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics discovered that jobs in the service sector, which include things like teaching, nursing, and housekeeping, are being “obliterated by technology”. From 2000 to 2010, 1. 1 million secretarial jobs disappeared, as did 500, 000 jobs for accounting and auditing clerks. Other jobs, such as travel agents and data entry workers, have also been declining fast due to technological advances. This means that soon enough there will no longer be jobs for humans because AIs will have taken them.

In addition, a major case in point is the development of autonomous weapons which allow AI to decide when to fire, with how much force to use, and on what target. A group of robotics and AI researchers signed an open letter that was presented at the 2015 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which decided it was best for the United Nations to ban the further development of weaponized AI that could operate “beyond meaningful human control. ” The letter was signed by over 20, 000 people, including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Noam Chomsky, additionally many of the researchers in the fields of AI. The petition followed a statement in 2013 by Christof Heyns calling for a halt on testing and deploying armed robots. A stop in advancing killing machines until the nations of the world come to agree on limitations of the deployment of autonomous weapons seems reasonable. For instance, most nations of the world have signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which was one major reasons that several nations, including South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina, dropped their programs to develop nuclear weapons and that those who already had them lessened their nuclear arsenals. So, if the United Nations could do this then why not create limitations on the development of autonomous weapons in order to keep people safe.