The Sentient Machine: The Coming Age of Artificial Intelligence

Husain (CEO, SparkCognition) advocates for continued development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and pushes back against anti-AI critics that call for curtailing or regulating AI research. On the contrary, he maintains AI is our best hope for solving looming problems in health care, energy production, financial systems, and security. Beginning with an overview and history of AI, Husain then describes how artificial narrow intelligence—expert systems optimized for a specific task or ability—is revolutionizing the aforementioned areas by being able to "think" more quickly to analyze possibilities and react faster than human decision-makers. On the subject of artificial general intelligence, possessing both intent and sentience, he is necessarily less specific and persuasive. This is because such intelligence is likely to be incomprehensible to us in that it will think and reach conclusions without using the intuitive shortcuts and assumptions evolved into human intelligence. Concerns about privacy or human lives becoming inconsequential are dismissed as being rhetorical distractions from the good that AI will bring.