When people hear the term artificial intelligence or AI, there may be a tendency to think of the latest “Terminator” movie or fall for the hype of menacing machines controlling our existence and destroying humanity.
Tim Hwang, a lawyer, writer, and researcher working at the intersection of emerging technologies and society, says this isn’t realistic; machine learning and AI aren’t as they’re portrayed in the movies. Hwang is the former director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance AI Initiative and has previously served Google’s global public policy lead on AI. In a recent IEEE Spectrum article, he says, “I think that a lot of the people who work on machine learning on a day-to-day basis are pretty humble about the technology because they’re largely confronted with how frequently it just breaks and doesn’t work.”