Running Head: HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN AMELIORATE OUR FUTURE

How Artificial Intelligence Can Ameliorate Our Future

Ryuichi Shinzato
Westminster College

HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN AMELIORATE OUR FUTURE

How Artificial Intelligence Can Ameliorate Our Future

We tend not to think about things we used to normally consider as we grow up because of
the society that makes you feel foolish to dream of visionary things. Have you thought about
when autonomous cars or robots, that can do anything for you like from sci-fi, are going to
happen in reality? The good thing is that you are about to witness some of those in the near
future. Though, the bad news is that we are still in the middle of developing new technologies to
make our lives even better. It is still better to be present at this moment if you can imagine
yourself in the middle of nowhere that there is no personal computer, car, vacuum, or even
languages. Looking at the past where there were no advanced technologies, our lives have
gotten much better with countless inventions such as the vacuum, car, personal computer, and so
on. However, all of which are still limited to single tasks or needs to be operated by hand today.
In this paper, I am going to examine impacts of Artificial Intelligence to humanity from the past
to the future with a focus of autonomous deliberate actions in robotics.
First of all, what is Artificial Intelligence? It is defined as machines that perform tasks
normally requiring human intelligence (Rapaport, 2012).The term was coined by John
McCarthy, who was an American cognitive scientist and computer scientist. At the Dartmouth
Conference, which was devoting the subject for the first time in 1956 (AITopics). The roots of
Artificial Intelligence may have originally derived from Greek myths of Hephaestus, the
blacksmith who manufactured mechanical servants, and the bronze man Talos. Many other
myths also include the concept of AI (McCorduck, 2004). Interestingly, the first model of the AI
robot was named ELIZA and designed to work as a psychotherapist that imitates the empathic
communication style of Carl Rogers, whose humanistic psychological theory centers on selfactualization that would lead ones personality, named ELIZA (Luxton, 2014). If you have an

HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN AMELIORATE OUR FUTURE

iPhone, you can ask your iPhones artificial intelligence Siri about who ELIZA was. The main
reason why ELIZA does not exist today is often mentioned as its lack of proper functionality.
However, as your iPhones Siri might tell you about it, ELIZA contained negative emotion,
which was probably unexpected from the initial program. The question would be raised why was
it not allowed to have negative emotion? As you would not expect your psychotherapists to
provide you with gloomy opinions or moods, ELIZA was programed software that functioned
based on its program. Therefore, it needed to be reprogramed and remove that negative emotion
part since it was probably included by mistake, and that explains why most of todays AI robots
do not contain emotions. It is because of uncertainty of controlling their emotions based on
programming of AI.
Could there be potentially harmful aspects of AI to humanity? Recently, Google had an
acquisition of a 50-employee artificial intelligence company from Great Britain for allegedly
more than 500 million dollars to ensure they have sufficient support not to fail and pose threats to
us. Although 500 million dollar is less than 0.1 percent of Googles net worth of approximately
33 billion dollars, in common sense, investing that amount in a little company explains how
grave the study of AI is. AI could potentially be more dangerous than nuclear weapons as Tesla
Motors and Space X CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and English theoretical
physicist Stephan Hawking argue that once it is developed and takes off, AI would start
redesigning its own platforms, exceed human intelligence, and soon be out of our control. An
ongoing research on AI conducted by Future of Life Institute states that we could one day lose
control of AI systems via the rise of super intelligences that do not act in accordance with human
wishes and that such powerful systems would threaten humanity (Jones, 2014). That is
probable because if we can invent a fully developed AI robot that can process things as humans

HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN AMELIORATE OUR FUTURE

do, then it will probably easily perform tasks in one second that would require humans to do the
same work for an hour or so, just like Microsoft Excel can calculate numbers much faster than
we do.
Moreover, there are some potential social impacts of AI that could threaten our society.
Here is one of those cases that actually takes place in Tokyo. Fast food restaurants have been
replacing their employees with AI vending machines so that they can reduce the number of
employees they have to hire, which reduces costs. Job loss has been already occurring due to the
development of AI, even jobs related to psychological or mental health field could be replaced in
future since autonomous AI agents that can learn from the real world and communicate with
people just like a human already exist today, though they are not capable of conducting mental
health services yet (Luxton, 2014). Even if autonomous AI agents could complete mental health
services, there would arise questions that Counsels from machines are not as effectual as ones
from humans or How can a machine that does not have a heart understand our feelings? If the
time comes, we will need research on whether autonomous AI robots can counsel and soothe
people as real human psychologists do.
There has been an appearance of artificial pets since the 1990s starting from its first
popular model Tamagotchi, and subsequently Furbies and Giga pet. What attracted people is that
when raising artificial pets, users can experience emotional attachment similar to raising real pets
(Benyon and Mival, 2008). Even though the evidence of health effects arisen from real
companion pets to humans is meager, there has been some health improving facts found among
those who enjoy animals, especially single persons (Meyers, 2014). In the research of Benyon
and Mival, they also found that artificial pets improve users long-term social and emotional
relationships, which would eventually lead users life quality to improve. Therefore, artificial

HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN AMELIORATE OUR FUTURE

pets can also offer as many benefits as real pets. According to the American Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 3.9 million dogs enter shelters each year in the U.S. and of 1.2
million are euthanized. As a dog person, I believe artificial pets could be a substitute to some
users who would not be able to take care of real companion pets someday so that no dog persons
or dog would have to feel sorrow.
The AI robot has been eliminating limitations that we have been stuck on in the clinical
field. The biggest advantage from including AI technology in this field is that it can reduce errors
resulted from human cognitive errors and fatigue since humans are vulnerable to making
mistakes. In addition, AI technology could help practitioners deal with uncertainty and improve
efficiency in terms of work speed since its program would not have a hard time dealing with
complex data and pull out only relevant information to make optimal decisions (Luxton, 2014).
Within merely a century, the field of AI has been significantly progressing. There are
enormous investigations that are going on just like Stanford University announced its century
prolonged project on how the effects of AI will ripple through every day aspects of how people
work, live, and play, in last December. I believe that the world can become a better place and to
make that actually happen, AI has a key role to the development of humanity because if there are
autonomous cars, which Google and Tesla Motors have been already testing in California, then
we will not have to worry about people getting hurt from car accidents by texting while driving
or drunk driving. Furthermore, if there are autonomous robots, they can help people with
disabilities and provide help to those who in need anywhere as well as protecting humanity from
criminal cases, which could eventually offer us a truly protected and secure world. The goal
seems very far away and almost unrealistic; however we can strive for it since we are already
seeing civilization and there is no way we can ignore it for humanity and our exciting future.

HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN AMELIORATE OUR FUTURE

References
AITopics. (n.d.). Retrieved March 25, 2015, from http://aitopics.org/misc/brief-history
Benyon, D. and Mival, O. (2008) Landscaping personification technologies: From interactions to
relationships. In Mary Czerwinski, Arnold M. Lund, Desney S. Tan, editors, Extended
Abstracts Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,
CHI 2008, Florence, Italy, pages 3657-3662, ACM, 2008
Jones, R. (2014, December 2). Stephan Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end
mankind. Retrieved March 25, 2015.
Luxton, D. D. (2014). Artificial intelligence in psychological practice: Current and future
applications and implications. Professional Psychology: Research And Practice, 45(5),
332-339. Doi:10. 1037/a0034559
McCorduck, P. (1979). Machines who think: A personal inquiry into the history and prospects of
artificial intelligence. San Francisco, California: W.H. Freeman.
Myers, D. (2014). Exploring psychology in modules: With updates on dsm-5. S.l.: Worth Pub.
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