The Age of AI: Could Future AI Spell Doom?

     In tandem with the rise of the Internet and the age of information, artificial intelligence has made a groundbreaking debut. ChatGPT, a natural language processing tool developed by Open-AI, is on course to be one of the most influential technologies of all time. Have you ever wondered how the search bar in Google somehow knows what you are going to type in, how you get recommended videos on YouTube that fit the exact niche that you are interested in, or how Siri and Alexa can give you such accurate responses? All of those technologies are fueled and run by AI technologies. But what exactly is artificial intelligence? 

    John McCarthy, a respected computer scientist, defines AI as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.” That may seem obvious, but at its core, that is what AI is. On a more complex level, AI is a field that combines computer science, datasets, and machine learning to solve problems. It is a tool that computer scientists use to solve problems and to embed in certain technologies to help them run in more complex ways. It is a machine problem-solver. In recent times, however, there has been talk that AI will create more problems than it will fix. 

    AI has started moving towards being ingrained into more and more technologies. It is embedded into the phones we use, the cars we drive, and the websites that we visit. Over the past decade, it has seen a significant rise in its implementation into our daily lives, without us knowing it. But do not worry, Siri is no Skynet. Alexa will not try to take over the world (not yet anyway). The AI that we experience are machine-learning algorithms with no w
ill of their own. But whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay. It has already started setting its roots deep into our society, and those roots will only increase and grow deeper. The revolution of the internet drastically changed how the world worked: the ways in which we communicated, worked, accessed information, interacted, played, passed the time, and lived were fundamentally changed. That sort of overhaul of how society was run changed then, and AI will only continue to evolve and become second nature to us. But what do people now actually think of it?

    Because AI has the potential for such massive change, people are bound to have strong opinions about it. The goal of this paper is to gauge the perceptions of AI between students, who will enter the workforce alongside AI, and current faculty at High Point University, who have been both members of higher education and experts in their fields all without AI. Generational gaps and divides have been known culturally to produce differing opinions on a range of subjects: politics, technology, and music to name just a few. AI has massive potential for good, but an equally scary potential for harm.