By Ya Han Hsu

Dear Sophia Mao,

You told the readers the problems about artificial intelligence, or AI. People fear that it may run off the track and beyond humans’ control. There are also examples, Amazon’s AI for rating candidates in a misogynistic way, the Tesla Autopilot function causing deaths and crashes. Another problem is that people are afraid AI will replace laborers in the future, causing unemployment.

In my view, I can’t tell whether the AI will go beyond humans’ control. I’ve heard lots of opinions, some asure people that AI won’t run off the track, others warned us not to rely on it. As I haven’t learnt how to write the programs and not enough knowledge of AI, I can’t say if it will harm people or not, but we still have to be careful, there is still a risk.

As for the other problem, that AI may cause unemployment, I think that the governments have to prepare for it. For example, they could form a tax for AI. According to the amount the companies rely on AI, they have to pay taxes to let the government help people who couldn’t find jobs.

Another solution may be changing the education system. If people won’t be able to find jobs that just listen to superiors and do simple things, we need to make sure students have the ability to do other jobs or create a business of their own. For example in Taiwan, though the government has tried to change the education systems, there are still problems. We attach great importance to tests, and not application. Tests, especially those with only a specific answer and certain options are the very thing that is training students into machines like AI, only AI could do better.

However, the sad thing is that the system couldn’t be changed quickly, we still need to take tests and maybe face AI’s competition in the future. People may have to face all kinds of problems with AI in the future. The things we could do is to prepare ourselves, prepare ourselves so that we would be able to solve the problems.

Thank you for writing this article, I had a deep thought while I was reading it.

Sincerely, Ya Han Hsu