Raising Citizen AI

Artificial intelligence is understandably a very hot topic in today’s circles of innovation and business development given the potentially huge benefits; and research on how to make machines learn and think like humans is one of the biggest areas of interest in technology today. The reason for AI’s sudden explosion on the scene is that AI has made massive progress in just the last few years mainly due to the exponential rise in the amount of data on consumer behaviour available, the accessibility of the required computational power and the recent advances in AI techniques and machine learning algorithms.

Today’s artificial intelligence is what is known as narrow/weak AI, as it is currently designed to perform only narrow tasks like facial recognition or driving a car. However, as the technology advances the goal of researchers and investors is to create what is known as general/strong AI which is self-learning and would able to eventually outperform humans at most cognitive tasks. As explained by I.J. Good back in 19651, designing smarter AI systems is itself a cognitive task. Such an Artificial Intelligence system could potentially undergo repeated self-improvement, triggering an intelligence explosion leaving human intellect far behind.

While such a superintelligence could have the potential to solve world issues like hunger, poverty and disease as never before comprehended, it…