Mathematician on AI dystopia and human superiority over machines

As computing technology rapidly advances, there has been much discussion of the potential threats posed by artificial intelligence. But the author of a book that explores the nature of machine versus human intelligence has said some of these debates over the future of AI have been overhyped and may be distracting from more pressing issues. Junaid Mubeen, a research mathematician turned educator and author of Mathematical Intelligence: A Story of Human Superiority Over Machines, which will be published November 1, told Newsweek one of the reasons he wrote the book was that AI has generated significant amounts of publicity recently. "Some of it may be justified because there are exciting developments coming through, but much of it, I think, is overhyped," Mubeen said. "And I think there's a real risk that we're going to rush to judgment, exaggerate the capabilities of AI in the process and undermine our own human intelligence. "It was Arthur C. Clarke who said, 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,' and we're seeing that now," he said. Mubeen pointed to the example of the Google engineer who made headlines earlier this year after saying that a chatbot the company developed, called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), had acquired sentience. At the core of this kind of machine learning-based artificial intelligence, which is being used in a huge variety of applications--everything from medicine and agriculture to astronomy and robotics--is pattern recognition. Machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. "That is just one aspect of intelligence," Mubeen said. "They have the appearance of intelligence--when you're engaging with a chatbot, it can feel like you're conversing with a human.