Today, AI, short for artificial intelligence, is a familiar word to the public. It can be seen in more and more aspects of our lives. For instance, you can ask Siri how the weather is. You can open an app to take a glance at the news, which may be filtered by AI according to your interest. Or when you get lost, open the map and it will guide you to your destination according to the shortest route. Beyond a doubt, AI has greatly assisted us in our daily lives thanks to its strong capacity for calculation and the ability to utilize big data.

The news that AlphaGo triumphed in its final game against South Korean Go grandmaster Lee Sedol went viral all over the world last year. Some people regarded it as a milestone of progress in AI development while others started to show concerns. On one hand, AI can replace workers in some areas with its efficiency and lower cost in the long term. What’s more, they are always energetic and never ask for leave. Recently Amazon opened its first self-service supermarket, Amazon Go, in Seattle. Consumers can walk into the AI-enabled store, grab the things you need and then walk out the store swaggeringly. No cashiers or security guards are involved in the process. On the other hand, people are worried that if AI keeps growing at this rate, it will have its own mind someday in the future, then free itself from the control of humankind and launch a war against us. Even Stephen Hawking warned that AI may cause an apocalypse in the future.

The pros and cons of AI are a complicated problem that different people have different opinions about. In my perspective, for the time being, we can focus on the research and development of AI at ease because the current ability of AI, Weak AI, is far from being able to destroy the world. Weak AI is available just in some specific areas; it still has a long way to go to warrant our concerns.

For now, it’s beyond our ability to come up with an algorithm that turns Weak AI into Strong AI. But it’s hard to affirm whether the technology will meet a choking point or will make a breakthrough sometime in the future.

In a word, technology is a double-edge sword. While making use of it, we need to be cautious about the potential danger it may bring and start to plan counter measures against an emergence of AI that is going against the will of mankind.