For some people, the term “black box” brings to mind the recording devices in airplanes that are valuable for postmortem analyses if the unthinkable happens. For others it evokes small, minimally outfitted theaters. But black box is also an important term in the world of artificial intelligence.
The benefits of AI for human well-being are wide-ranging and well publicised. Among them is the technology’s potential to advance social justice, combat systemic racism, improve cancer detection, mitigate the environmental crisis and boost productivity.
The artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Geoffrey Hinton recently resigned from Google, warning of the dangers of the technology “becoming more intelligent than us”. His fear is that AI will one day succeed in “manipulating people to do what it wants”.
A machine can only “do whatever we know how to order it to perform,” wrote the 19th-century computing pioneer Ada Lovelace. This reassuring statement was made in relation to Charles Babbage’s description of the first mechanical computer.
Debates about AI often characterise it as a technology that has come to compete with human intelligence. Indeed, one of the most widely pronounced fears is that AI may achieve human-like intelligence and render humans obsolete in the process.
The sky is big and full of information that AI tools can help astronomers unlock.
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The PerceptivX Magazine.