Modern technology has advanced at an exponential rate since the turn of the millennium, and similar to how the epoch of the steam engine brought upon the Industrial Age, the epoch of the personal computer has brought upon the dawn of the Information Age. At the continuously compounding rate of innovation and invention, modern technology was prognosticated to hit a wall where advancements become rare. This prediction has been dubbed as Polanyi’s Paradox. As all theoretical barriers in the modern age, Polanyi’s Paradox has been seemingly overcome by the top computer scientists and software engineers with the advent of complex machine learning in artificial intelligence. These advancements, at the current rate, will change almost everything about
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From your phone to your car, nearly everything is operated, at least in part, by computers. At the current continuously compounding rate, society is postulated to reach an innovation barrier, dubbed simply as Polanyi’s Paradox. Polanyi’s Paradox says that we know more than we can teach, and that information is what makes machines unable to advance intellectually like a human can. However, recent innovations in complex machine learning paint a different picture. Self-driving cars and programs smart enough to beat even the world’s best in the most strategic games are two prime examples of modern technology’s rebuttal to Polanyi’s Paradox illustrated by Moshe Vardi in “The Moral Imperative of Artificial Intelligence.” Google’s AlphaGo uses algorithms for intuition instead of raw hard-coded if-then statements or brute force in the Japanese board game, Go. Automotive manufacturers like Tesla, lead by Elon Musk, also have a rebuttal to Polanyi’s Paradox: the self-driving car. These cars aren’t pre-programmed to know how to handle the road at every turn and how to maintain a lane, but instead use similar intuition to Google’s AlphaGo to learn how to do these tasks. (Vardi 5) This intuition-driven brain will make most human workers obsolete. Specifically, he talks about the mortality rate of increased substance abuse of white, middle-aged Americans that face unemployment, a problem that would only be encouraged by mechanical autonomy making these people expendable in the workforce. (Vardi 5) He also says that we have a moral imperative to adapt to these new innovations instead of fearing them, or else these stark changes will disrupt our society in ways we could not have expected. In summation of Moshe Vardi’s article, he intends to press the possibility that artificial intelligence will continue to advance at rates unprecedented by 20th century computer scientists
From your phone to your car, nearly everything is operated, at least in part, by computers. At the current continuously compounding rate, society is postulated to reach an innovation barrier, dubbed simply as Polanyi’s Paradox. Polanyi’s Paradox says that we know more than we can teach, and that information is what makes machines unable to advance intellectually like a human can. However, recent innovations in complex machine learning paint a different picture. Self-driving cars and programs smart enough to beat even the world’s best in the most strategic games are two prime examples of modern technology’s rebuttal to Polanyi’s Paradox illustrated by Moshe Vardi in “The Moral Imperative of Artificial Intelligence.” Google’s AlphaGo uses algorithms for intuition instead of raw hard-coded if-then statements or brute force in the Japanese board game, Go. Automotive manufacturers like Tesla, lead by Elon Musk, also have a rebuttal to Polanyi’s Paradox: the self-driving car. These cars aren’t pre-programmed to know how to handle the road at every turn and how to maintain a lane, but instead use similar intuition to Google’s AlphaGo to learn how to do these tasks. (Vardi 5) This intuition-driven brain will make most human workers obsolete. Specifically, he talks about the mortality rate of increased substance abuse of white, middle-aged Americans that face unemployment, a problem that would only be encouraged by mechanical autonomy making these people expendable in the workforce. (Vardi 5) He also says that we have a moral imperative to adapt to these new innovations instead of fearing them, or else these stark changes will disrupt our society in ways we could not have expected. In summation of Moshe Vardi’s article, he intends to press the possibility that artificial intelligence will continue to advance at rates unprecedented by 20th century computer scientists