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 near future.
Though, the bad news is that we are 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 was no 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 task 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 future within a focus of
autonomous deliberate actions in robotics.
First of all, what is Artificial Intelligent? 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, 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 incorporate the idea of intelligent
robots. Many other myths also include the concept of AI (McCorduck, 2004). Interestingly, The
first model of the AI robot is 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 function. However, as
your iPhones Siri might tell you about it, ELIZA contained negative emotion, which was
probably not supposed to be included or 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 mood, ELIZA was programed software
that functions based on its program. Therefore, it needed to be reprogramed and remove that
negative emotion part, 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.
Could there be potentially harmful aspects of AI to humanity? Recently, Google had an
acquisition of a 50 employees 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 dollars are 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 an English theoretical physicist
Stephan Hawking argue that once it is developed and take off from our hands, it would start
redesigning their 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
completely makes sense because if we can invent a fully developed AI robot that can process
things as humans do, then it will probably easily perform tasks in one second that would require

HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN AMELIORATE OUR FUTURE

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 has been
replacing their employees with AI vending machines so that they can reduce the number of
employees they have to hire that results of reducing 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 real world and communicate
with people just like a human already exists 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 the one that does not have a heart understand our feelings. If
the time comes, we will need researches on that whether autonomous AI robots can counsel and
soothe people as real human psychologists do.
There has been appearance of artificial pets since 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 affects 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 ameliorating. Therefore,
artificial pets can also offer as many benefits as real pets. According to the American Society for

HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN AMELIORATE OUR FUTURE

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 stock on in the clinical
field. The biggest advantage from encompassing 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 hard time dealing complex
data and pull out only relevant information to make optimal decisions (Luxton, 2014). Though,
the use of AI in our every day life would not seem to take place soon.
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 it's a century
prolonged project on how the effects of AI will ripple through every day aspect 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 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 drunken driving. Furthermore, if there are autonomous robots, they can help people with
disabilities and provide help to those who needs in 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.
Rapaport, W. (2012, September 19). SOME DEFINITIONS OF"ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE" Retrieved March 25, 2015, from
http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/definitions.of.ai.html
Russell, S., Dewey, D., & Tegmark, M. (2015, January 23). The Future of Life Institute.
Retrieved March 25, 2015, from http://futureoflife.org/misc/open_letter