The Rise of Machine Learning and AI: How far will it go?

"We’ve traditionally thought of intelligence as something mysterious that can only exist in biological organisms, especially humans, but from my perspective as a physicist, intelligence is simply a certain kind of information processing performed by elementary particles moving around. There’s no law of physics that says that we can’t build machines more intelligent than us in all ways. That makes intelligence in AI incredibly important because it suggests that we’ve only seen the tip of the intelligence iceberg, and that there’s amazing potential to unlock the full intelligence that’s latent in nature, and to use it to help humanity either flourish or flounder" - Mark Tegmark, MIT physicist and author of Life 3.0

We are showered with an oft-dystopian account of humanity’s future, charged by the risks of ever-advancing artificial intelligence. From Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, to the world’s most renowned scientists and entrepreneurs, everywhere one may look you can observe the growing eminence of AI in modern society. This rise comes with considerations, however. One may approach the ‘ethics of AI’, which assesses the transparency, privacy, personal data, communications, news, etc, to the scientific potential of the technology itself.

AI and machine learning is shaping global society; there are integral legal or ethical considerations that must be made- for example its application with healthcare, insurance, borrowing money, recruitment, news feed, political persuasion and policing to name a handful of areas where it’s being used on a minute-by-minute basis. Political, business, education and social leaders are only now considering the very complex challenges of using AI in a way that is ethical and sustainable- and it’s time society begins to catch up with AI technology.