Elon Musk is terrified about humanity creating sentient AI like in the Terminator and The Matrix movies. But surely it’s an overreaction? What other myths exist about AI? And what are our biggest hopes on AI’s promises? We asked these questions to actual AI experts, and this is how they responded.
“The notion that AI will be so smart that it will take over our lives. At the end of the day, AI is just a tool. Pretty much like the shovel or kitchen knife, it can be used both in good ways and bad ways. But what we shouldn’t forget is that the responsibility will always be with humans. So if an AI goes wrong, we have to find the people behind it and punish them, and not necessarily the technology on the front.”
– Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. He’s a German-American computer scientist.
“The biggest myth about AI is that it’s a black box – it’s not. No matter how sophisticated the AI algorithm designs, they can be changed, adjusted and continuously refined. So AI isn’t something that we can’t do anything about, because we retain control on how we shape its future.”
– MariaGrazia Squicciarini, Chief of Executive Office and Director a.i., UNESCO
“Most people have no idea about the importance of the current exponential growth in technology. Forget about smart AI, there’s this idea that we’re already in the fourth industrial revolution, which I think is absolutely not true – we aren’t even in the subset of an industrial revolution. What we’re at the beginning of is in fact the information revolution, which started around the 1960s, and it’s going to have a bigger impact than the agricultural or the industrial revolution.”
– Calum Chace, Speaker, Best-selling author of Surviving AI and The Economic Singularity
“Biggest myth about AI is that it’s dangerous and it’s surpassing humans and human intelligence. Don’t get me wrong, AI can outperform in many human tasks like image, text and voice recognition, so in these assistive technologies AI will be a great helper to humankind. AI will never be dangerous, I don’t think it will ever acquire consciousness, and malevolent use of AI will be only controlled or limited by the human mind.”
– Alex Zhavoronkov, Founder and CEO, Insilico Medicine
“AI is going to take away all of our jobs, AI is dangerous, and that AI wouldn’t help humanity to have a better life!”
– Majid AlShehry, Official Spokesperson, Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority
“Today, there’s a lot of hype around AI, and a lot of solutions marketed as AI are actually quite simple linear regression models and scripts. Apart from a tiny core of impressive AI out there, but a lot of it is just hype and marketing and really not all that exciting, to be honest.”
– Geir Engdahl, CTO and Co-Founder of Cognite
“You have to be good in math to excel at AI, or you need to be amazing in science to master the nuances of AI. If AI learning models are designed intelligently, with intuitive use at its very core, then I think everyone can be a potential expert at learning how to apply AI across different fields.”
– Heidi Sampang, MD, Philippines Flying Labs
“AI has a very big potential to help the humanitarian sector. For example, with intelligent mapping of areas, AI can easily identify areas affected by natural disasters or conflict anywhere in the world – but we aren’t doing that yet at the humanitarian level, we aren’t getting the data for the right kind of analysis. This leads to fragmented responses to any disaster. But with AI coming in, my hope is that we can better target our action plan and limited resources to have the maximum humanitarian impact to natural catastrophes all around the world.”
– Heidi Sampang, MD, Philippines Flying Labs
“The rate at which we are progressing with AI is amazing, but we need to remember that there are lots of parts to AI than just pure machine learning, and if we improve on those additional aspects of AI as well as we have done with machine learning, there’ll be a tremendous future for what can be done by humans in what I call as the AI Age.”
– Conrad Wolfram, CEO, Wolfram Research Europe Ltd
“The way I see AI is really no different from the way software and the internet has changed the world. It’s not an abstract thing, AI is going to be all-pervasive, it’s going to be everywhere in every software stack, and that’s going to change the world. It’s not going to happen overnight because it’s not just about the technology, it’s about the people, the process, the change management. But ultimately as software is eating the world, AI is going to have an even bigger impact in the near future.”
– Debanjan Saha, CEO, DataRobot
“AI is going to offer a huge advancement to the entire humankind, it’s an extension of the human brain – like a sidekick which can add on to and plug the holes to a lot of stuff that we simply aren’t capable of doing. In all those instances and more, AI can take us forward and fill those blanks as we go ahead. Immediately, AI is going to be very useful in the medical industry – everything from radiology, brain surgery or even treatment for cancer. All the complicated things that we aren’t humanly capable of processing, AI has the capacity to scale itself and find solutions for us.”
– Ajay Sunkara, Co-Founder and CEO, Nala Robotics
“If human beings are sufficiently patient to study and understand not only the concepts of AI but also innovative enough to understand when, where and how to apply AI in different situations, we will see that AI has more advantages than disadvantages. It will give us the opportunity to solve the problems we face as individuals and communities better than ever, and that’s what I’m most excited about the potential for AI all over the world.”
– Toyosi Akerele-Ogunsiji, Founder, RISE Networks
“My biggest hope is that AI will help us use resources as efficiently as possible. It will help all of humankind all over the world to do as much as possible and fulfil our maximum potential while reducing our energy consumption, material impacts and environmental impact while leading healthy and happy lives in the future.”
– Geir Engdahl, CTO and Co-Founder of Cognite
“I think AI is going to transform all of our lives, it’s going to be as impactful as the printing press or the book has been as a catalyst to human progress. AI will help us understand what people do well, and do it with us, teach us and do it better. More importantly, I think AI will help us get rid of remedial and repeatable work most of us find ourselves doing every single day. I think our AI future’s going to be great!”
– Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. He’s a German-American computer scientist.
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