Dear President Elect,

It today’s society the fear fear of artificial intelligence is being promoted by pop culture on a regular basis; however, this is not the correct response to developing technologies. As this technology develops I urge you to make well informed decisions on legislation involving it.

According to a recent article in The Economist,  the advancement in technology is causing worry, but these worries are misplaced. “With supercomputers in every pocket and robots looking down on every battlefield, just dismissing them as science fiction seems like self-deception. The question is how to worry wisely.” Take for example nuclear power: the current fear of nuclear technology has lead to stagnation in the development of nuclear power. The initial fear came from a lack of technology, which has been resolved; however, the fear remains causing the new technology to not be implemented. We can not let fear such as this rule our current views on artificial intelligence.

This article from the New York Daily News points out the aspects in which AI has already advanced beyond humans. “The artificial intelligence machine correctly diagnosed a 60-year-old woman’s rare form of leukemia within 10 minutes — a medical mystery that doctors had missed for months at the University of Tokyo.” The current advancement in AI is allowing for mass data analysis much quicker than a human would be able to analyze the data at the moment. This the main advancement of AI over humans.

“Centaur chess [teams of humans and machines] is all about amplifying human performance.[...]’You merge the computer games with the human games and you’ve got something that is quantitatively and qualitatively out there.” Article from Bloom Reach explains the concept of centaur chess, the combination of a chess computer and a human put together to make the best moves possible. This method of play has resulted in consistently high performance including beating Grand Masters and the greatest computer chess players in the world.

As I hope you now understand artificial intelligence does deserve caution in development but that should not detract from how it is viewed as a whole. I hope that you use your influence as president to guide us to a path of reasonable legislation regarding artificial intelligence.

Sincerely,

Drew Lash

Cassidy, Mike. "Centaur Chess Marries Human and Machine -- BloomReach." BloomReach.

Ng, Alfred. "IBM’s Watson Gives Proper Diagnosis after Doctors Were Stumped." NY Daily News. N.p., 07 Aug. 2016. Web. 08 Nov. 2016.

Mike Cassidy Http://bloomtest.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/logo-enhold1.png, 17 Dec. 2016. Web. 08 Nov. 2016. "The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence." The Economist. The Economist Newspaper, 2015. Web. 08 Nov. 2016.