Yet another public personality has spoken about the pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence. US’ former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has gone on record to say that AI would bring chaos to the world as we know it, if it is executed at the current phase — that is, without sufficient preparation.
Speaking at a promotional event for her new book What Happened (published by Simon & Schuster), Clinton said:
“Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, a lot of really smart people are sounding an alarm that we’re not hearing… And their alarm is artificial intelligence is not our friend. It can assist us in many ways if it is properly understood and contained. But we are racing headfirst into a new era of artificial intelligence that is going to have dramatic effects on how we live, how we think, how we relate to each other.”
She then went on to explain that how the millions of jobs would be on the line if automated machines and applications were implemented on a large scale. Clinton quoted the example of driverless cars by saying, “What are we going to do when we get driverless cars? It sounds like a great idea. And how many millions of people – truck drivers and parcel delivery people and cab drivers and even Uber drivers – what do we do with the millions of people who will no longer have a job? We are totally unprepared for that,’ she said.
While many noted names such as physicist Stephen Hawking and Tesla and SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk have already sounded alarm bells with regards to Artificial Intelligence and its potential harm, there are others who don’t think that way.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and futurist Ray Kurzweil are some of the famous names who believe that AI can actually do more good to the humans than harm.
Kurzweil, who currently runs a group at Google writing automatic responses to your emails in cooperation with the Gmail team, had once famously said, “It was fire that kept us warm, cooked our food, but also burnt our houses down. Technology is always a double-edged sword.”
