Artificial Intelligence

The scary thing about artificial intelligence is that people don't understand that it's NOT actually intelligent.

So many people think that intelligence and consciousness will "emerge" from computers when they get complicated enough programs and large enough memory banks, and someone could take advantage of people's beliefs one day.

Someday, someone could program a computer to look as if it has consciousness and intelligence, when in fact it will just be following that person's orders. In this way, he or she could convince people that the computer knows what's best for them and control people with their own consent. That's what's scary.

So never forget. Computers are not smarter than you. Computers are not alive.

A computer cannot make decisions for you. It can only follow directions that another person has thought of and programmed into it. These may be very complicated instructions that allow the computer to look as if it is alive. But they are still just instructions, created by another human being, who was alive, not by a computer, which is not alive.

Information and storage space do not equal intelligence, otherwise libraries would rule the world!

A computer is like a cookbook. A cookbook can have a lot of complicated recipes in it, but no matter how complicated they become, the cookbook never develops intelligence. The amount of space that information can be stored (AKA memory) can increase from 1 page to 100,000 pages, yet the book will never become intelligent or alive. We can stop expecting this of computers.