Lecture : Smart, but Not Wise

artificial intelligence (AI) — בינה מלאכותית. chatbot — תוכנה שמנהלת שיחה בכתב. app — אפליקציה. menu — תפריט. X-rays, scans — צילומי רנטגן וסריקות רפואיות. protein — חלבון. unfair — לא הוגן. fake — מזויף. Omer, Haifa — שם של תלמיד ושם של עיר.

Last Friday, Omer, a grade 10 student from Haifa, asked his phone for the fastest way to his grandmother's house. Within a second, he had an answer. He did not think about the technology behind it, and most of us don't either. Yet artificial intelligence, or AI, is part of our lives many times a day. It suggests the next word when we type a message, decides which videos appear on our screens and translates a menu in a foreign language almost immediately.

AI systems do not think the way people do. Instead, they learn patterns from huge amounts of data. A program that has been shown millions of photos of cats can recognize a cat in a photo it has never seen, even though nobody has explained to it what a cat is. Chatbots work in a similar way. They are trained on enormous quantities of text, so they become very good at predicting which words are likely to come next in a sentence.

Supporters of AI point to its many benefits. In medicine, AI tools can help doctors notice signs of disease in X-rays and other scans, sometimes earlier than a tired human eye would. In science, AI has helped researchers predict the shapes of proteins, a problem that scientists had struggled with for decades. For people who are blind, apps that read text aloud or describe a photo can make everyday life far more independent.

However, the same technology raises serious concerns. Because AI learns from data created by people, it may also learn their mistakes and their unfair opinions. If a system is trained mostly on information about one group of people, it might work less well for others. Chatbots can also give answers that sound confident but are simply wrong. In addition, AI makes it easy to create fake photos and videos, and this could make it harder to know what is real. Finally, many people are worried about work: some tasks that people do today are likely to be done by machines in the future, although new kinds of jobs may appear as well.

So should we be excited or afraid? Perhaps the honest answer is: a little of both. AI is a tool, and like any tool, it can be used wisely or carelessly. When you use a chatbot for homework, check its answers against a reliable source. Before you share a surprising picture, ask yourself who made it and why. And remember that a program which predicts words does not understand them the way you do. AI may be smart, but being wise is still our job.