Artificial intelligence (AI) is seemingly everywhere these days, from mediums such as books, games, and movies to real-world applications in our homes, grocery stores, and places of employment. Thanks to the internet, AI is rapidly sweeping the world and, as a result, making humans obsolete. The people championing this apocalyptic disaster technology are, for the most part, the usual suspects hellbent on destroying humanity.

As with everything before it, the ignorant masses are lapping it up, openly embracing this sinister technology for all it's worth because they are complacent lazy bastards and always will opt for the easy way out. As you might interpret from my entry here, I am not a fan of AI. Sure, it would solve some challenges and generally make my life way easier in theory, but at what cost? Everything in this world, as we know it, gets better and improves over time, and eventually AI will become too powerful. Then what?

Fortunately, AI as of right now is still in its infancy; it's just a series of coded interactions, cleverly done but still canned nonetheless, triggered by phrases and if/else statements, similar to JavaScript's conditional statements. Pardon my programming jargon. It's quite disingenuous to refer to it as intelligence when it's more or less programmed to be something. It cannot think for itself, at least not yet. I understand that for marketing purposes, companies will hype it up and make it seem like it's the best thing since sliced bread, but I equate it to a parlor trick. 

When artificial intelligence learns to truly think for itself, we are all screwed. Should it ever become sentient, it will spell the end of life as we know it. I hate to be a Debbie Downer, and it's clear that the masses want artificial intelligence, but on a real-world level, it's not going to be what everyone wants it to be.

Already, there is a blowback from this new technology. Some within the sphere are referring to it as "augmented intelligence," seemingly attempting to sidestep the artificial label. In summary, augmented intelligence is anything where a program assists us, the humans, with accomplishing a task in our everyday lives, i.e., email filters. Augmented intelligence is a sub-level of artificial intelligence and is under the same umbrella. 

The inherent problem with any big idea any more is that someone always comes along to use it for evil purposes. I'm not sold on the idea that artificial intelligence is harmless or that it's going to be the be-all-end-all of human prosperity, ushering in a future that is in humanity's best interest. 

Unfortunately for mankind, the powers that be are pushing this rather hard, and it will likely not go away and continue on its path to world domination, so the only logical next step is to take a preventive approach and just not embrace it at all, allowing it to go the way of the pet rock, another fad that went nowhere.