Nowadays, with the presence of AI in every corner of human society, there remains some argument as to whether AI will be a threat to humankind. I am of the opinion that AI would not be human’s primary menace, at least in the near future.

Firstly, AIs are programmed only to perform specific tasks. AI stands for Artificial Intelligence, which is intelligence created by humans and demonstrated by machines. For example, Siri is an AI developed by Apple. Siri helps Apple’s users optimize their devices by doing simple tasks like making phone calls, doing math calculations, or doing internet recommendations. As is seen, an AI has the power to finish various sorts of work, but it is all because it is programmed to do so. Most of the AIs people now know are called “weak” AI, which is a type of AI that is limited to a specific area. This kind of AI is programmed to complete some tasks in an exceedingly specific field; they can perform even better than humans. However, the key point that makes them harmless to people is that AIs lack of consciousness like human. Without consciousness, they are powerless to create their own decision. All of their actions are the response to the commands that scientists put in their system, they will not do anything apart from that. Take Deep Blue-an AI developed by IBMas an example. Deep Blue is considered a chess-playing supercomputer, it defeated Garry Kasparov, a former World Chess Champion. People might think that this computer was so clever, and it can even get smarter and poses risks to humanity, but it is not true. Although Deep Blue’s performance was better than the best human chess player, chess is the only thing it can do. As a result, AI is nothing more than a tin box with the ability to perform tasks.

Secondly, AIs cannot think. Despite people’s assuming about how smart automatic machines are, there is literally not that much intelligence in an AI. Intelligence can be defined in various ways, but it can easily refer to the capacity for logic, understanding, learning, self-awareness, emotional knowledge, problem-solving, and critical thinking. Yet, AIs are able to do only a few of those things. Moreover, people cannot call something, which is unable to think, intelligent. Meanwhile, AIs actually do not think. AIs barely know the answer to any question, they are only weighing information from many sources and processes to offer the most probable answer. It is also how they learn; by giving more information and knowledge to AI, they can adjust their weighing process the subsequent time they answer. In consequence, the more information humans feed AI, the higher chance of AI getting a more accurate solution. IBM’s Watson is a great example of this. Within the game show called “Jeopardy”, there was a question about “US cities” where they gave out the clue: “ Its largest airport was named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle.”. The proper answer was “What is Chicago”, but Watson’s answer was “What is Toronto?????”. Watson was so confused about the question, which is represented in his five-question mark. All he could do was just form a guess. As can be seen, AIs are unable to think, they are only able to guess.

AI is still a developing area and humans do not know much about it at the moment. Yet, I believe AI will act as a human’s perfect assistant. However, AI is only a tool, which can be used by law offenders to commit crimes. Despite of this, AI is not likely to put humanity at risk.