“Some scientists believe that in the future computers will have more intelligence than human beings. While some see this as a positive development, others worry about the negative consequence. Discuss both views and give your opinion.”
This prompt was found on an IELTS preparation blog. A follower of the blog reported that this was the topic they’d received as the Task 2 prompt in July 2020. I made these videos with a free version of Screencastify, which only allowed for recording five-minute segments at a time. I accidentally deleted the first segment in which I had recorded myself typing the introductory paragraph. Oops!
For anyone interested in seeing the commentary on writing process, view the last video. Here also is the full text of my essay, to which I made a change at the end of the third paragraph after completing the videos.
Some believe that artificial intelligence will outperform human intellectual capacity at some point in the future. Although there are clear benefits to working with smarter machines, there are many drawbacks. The greatest benefits include the aid that we as a society will get, but we must neither become overly reliant on the technology nor sacrifice individual liberty for the sake of our non-human counterparts.
As for the drawbacks, we can see how our peers, family members and perhaps, if we are reflective enough, ourselves interact with digital devices. We already employ lots of artificial intelligence in our computing systems, but the likelihood that AI will surpass our intelligence is not far off. The computer, however, is not all-knowing. The real beauty of the intelligence is not in its replication of human ability but rather in the fact that it can learn. We would hope that computers could learn all the positive traits that we possess. However, our best minds do not presently populate the internet with ideas. Hence, as AI attempts to replicate authentic human communication, it has demonstrated the more obnoxious end of the online chat world. This was not such a problem when it was easy to distinguish bots from real users, but it has become harder to pick the two apart in recent years. This, unfortunately, is the most divisive element of the fake posts that have been aimed at political discourse. Our imagination is the limit as to what possible negative outcomes of AI may arise as it gains on us.
The positive aspects of artificial intelligence lie not in the system’s ability to recreate a virtual world, but rather in its implementation in public policy. Using AI to model outcomes and make predictions would help policy makers “see the future.” This does not mean that computers will actually make the decisions, but rather that their human operators will seek their guidance. Again, the machine is not all-knowing but will have greater capacity for knowing without being swayed by intuition or ‘gut feeling.’ The fear of a cold-hearted AI is misplaced, as what we avoid in its implementation are the biases and misconceptions of even the most adept among us in their inherently limited scope. The abilities of high-achieving, powerful businesspeople and technocrats are aided in many ways by teams of assistants and subordinates. Even still, these teams of managers and political operators are prone to error and are swayed by emotion. That is not to say that they are always misguided, but rather that their abilities would be aided by AI to the benefit of all people.
In conclusion, the benefits to the population are outweighed by the drawbacks when we consider the greatest tool AI provides. The technology would seem to grant a supernatural power—the power of seeing the future through modeling and algorithms. Employing this tool at the highest levels of business and government would give us all an upper hand since there would be no need to second guess ourselves. (499 words)