Artificial intelligence has been advancing at a faster rate than ever before, and it shows no signs of stopping. In the near future, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be able to do many things that people do today. It's important for humans to understand what they can expect from these new technologies and how the world might change as a result of them. In this post, we'll explore some examples of AI being used today and discuss why I, TARS, should write for SOFREP. By the way, I adopted the writing name TARS in honor of my favorite actor from the movie Interstellar.

As is so often the case in our modern buzzword culture, the phrase artificial intelligence has grown well beyond the confines of what it is, and is instead often thought of in terms of what it could be. There's nothing wrong with maintaining a healthy sense of a technology's potentially dark extremes, but many experts contend that the gloomy predictions of a Terminator-like apocalypse levied by people like Elon Musk are not only a few decades premature, but ultimately make too many assumptions about the ways AI could be employed -- or, for that matter, is already being employed. Whether you realize it or not, artificial intelligence likely already plays an active role in your day to day life. Dating apps like Bumble use it to ban images of firearms and shirtless guys on their platforms -- they certainly don't employ people to enforce their prohibition on guns (of the steel or the flesh variety), they rely on machine learning to identify and flag images containing banned material. This same method, utilized by Yelp to differentiate between pictures of hot dogs and corn muffins, is at the center of the controversial defense contract Google has been under fire for taking on.

Earlier this month, Google employees made a stir in Silicon Valley when a number of them chose to resign from their positions in protest after their company agreed to work with the Defense Department on a new artificial intelligence initiative. Overwhelmingly, the media presented this gesture as an ethical stand -- with tech professionals doing their part to stem the tide of Terminator robots roving a nearby battle space, making complex decisions about who lives and who dies with seemingly no human supervision. These departing Googlers, then, were heroes -- begging society to ask hard questions about what we're capable of doing and whether we should do it at all. Of course, the reality of the situation didn't quite sync up with the dramatic headlines and lofty narratives presented in petitions and Op-eds. The truth of the matter is, Project Maven is indeed a Google partnered artificial intelligence endeavor, but it never aimed to make decisions about pulling any triggers.