I am not at all opposed to AI. Perhaps the thing I least like about it is the name Artificial Intelligence* though it’s certainly far better than Trumps ‘Super Intelligence.’ But we seem stuck with it and I used the name extensively in the Jack Mack novels. Those are generally favorable to AI and feature a future society where it is well integrated into human life.
However, AI is in no way ready for prime time now. Yes, it can be helpful in some capacities. It’s proving useful in medicine, in coding. I would not trust it to drive taxis. Such things could, and probably will, come. The biggest objection at the moment is the power requirements. Much of AI is simply not worth the expenditures and negative environmental impacts.
I probably shouldn’t even mention (but will) AI ‘art’ and ‘music’ and so on. It is a joke. One thing AI definitely is not is creative. Might that and consciousness** come someday? No one can say. It’s still debated in Jack McFee’s society, almost two millennia in the future.
And it is a fascinating subject to debate — or to use as a element in fiction. Thoughts and conjectures on AI and robots in society was one of the jumping off points for the world building of the Jack Mack universe (along with an entirely unrelated and abandoned idea for an historical adventure that I merged into it). The story for which I originally conceived the universe has never been written (or more accurately, never finished) but several others have been.
Could they prove to be accurate? It doesn’t matter; my job is not to predict the future but to explore ‘what if?’ questions about it. The possible answers are endless.
*I might prefer ‘Machine Intelligence,’ which seems more accurate.
** I’m not even convinced we are conscious.
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