Artificial Intelligence is a topic that almost always includes discussions of human jobs disappearing, but Parc CEO Tolga Kurtoglu sees humans and AI working together to tackle things that neither could do on their own. Parc has been a part of the computing landscape from a long time back as Xerox Parc, and Kurtoglu has seen the rise of personal computing lead all the way to where we are now. Kurtoglu detailed the kind of work that Parc is doing in the AI ecosystem, and summed it up as building trust between AI and humans. Essentially, Kurtoglu and his people want to bring AI’s intelligence, judgment and built-in ethics up to the level of being trustworthy, and close collaboration with humans is one way that the company is looking at doing so.
Kurtoglu says that a major factor that necessitates trustworthy AI is the level of trust humans tend to invest in AI. He explained that once humans and AI are collaborating and communicating in two direction, some may take the advice or suggestions of an AI without question, which could easily cause issues. This is evident, and especially poignant, in cases such as a recent fatal crash wherein a man put too much trust into his Tesla vehicle’s self-driving systems, and reportedly did not heed the system’s warnings to take over, instead assuming that the system would be able to work itself out.
Kurtoglu’s vision seems bound to happen one way or another, but how it happens, when it happens, and what comes of it all depends on a variety of factors. One of the biggest is which form of AI-centric machine learning ends up reigning supreme; artificial intelligence based on pure machine learning is task-oriented, and can work in parallel with similar AI programs to produce a cognitive whole. AI based on neural networking, meanwhile, seeks to imitate the ways that humans learn and grow mentally and cognitively. Artificial general intelligence is the newest form of AI, and drops any pretense of humanity in favor of an AI program made up of many virtual, self-contained nodes, boasting the ability to learn and grow independently, but in a manner vastly different from how humans do so. So long as they are kept in check, the AI of the future could end up supplanting humanity in the workforce and possibly bringing about universal prosperity, or they could work alongside humans to bring the world’s advancements to new heights. Other outcomes are possible, of course, but those two are what AI engineers are working toward explicitly.