Ask a friend, a family member, or a colleague what they think about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and you will probably get one of the following answers:
- AI is so exciting! It can write essays and create the funniest pictures I’ve ever seen! AI is truly the best invention ever!
- I hear good things and I hear bad things, I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
- I don’t really have an opinion on it yet.
- Pretty soon that thing will be better at my job than me… I better start rethinking my career.
- AI is scary! Nobody understands how it works yet we let these big companies just roll with it.
- It’s probably going to end humanity as we know it.
Having asked some of the people in my life this very question, I have mostly gotten an answer that was some variation of one of the first four categories in my list.
I personally considered myself to be in the fifth group however I’m lately starting to lean heavily towards the last. I’m not denying that good things have and will continue to come out of AI enabled projects but I’m concerned that the race towards “more” and “better” might very well end in a global calamity. That race, driven by the sheer profit for the multinational companies that are currently taking part in it, is heating up with every passing day.
And I am a firm believer that we, the human beings on this earth, should have a say in what comes next. There’s a lot that will have to happen before it becomes a truly democratic discussion – if ever – but any successful attempt will require more awareness of the pros and cons.
This website aims to gather the information that helped me to think this all through and shape my personal opinion. I am by no means an AI expert, far from it, and I honestly don’t aim to ever be one either.
My intention here is truly simple: publish posts that provide you with information I believe should allow them to form an initial opinion of what the next step should be. I will not reproduce material from other sources but will just provide my view on why I think a piece of information is valuable and then link directly to it.
I’m organizing things in the following categories:
- Nice: examples that made me like AI
- Scary: examples that made me dislike AI
- What experts say: views & opinions from AI experts, scientists, and others
In addition to the different posts I’ll be adding, I’ve also created a “Learn more” page with some of the material that I believe may help others on their journey to understanding AI and the risks it brings.
One final thing: this is a work in progress that will never be nor intends to be a complete reference on the World of AI – there’s just too much information out there, much of it too hard for me to even begin to understand. And with the current rapid evolution in AI world, I’ll always be hopping behind it all anyway.