Can chatbots one day destroy us ??

While chatbots and conversational AI have become more prevalent and advanced, the idea that they could one day turn against us and become a threat to human existence is highly unlikely and speculative.

Bots and chat make it easier for people to buy the way they want to, when they want to–and that should be the goal of any business. Chatbots help to collect and augment the data collected.

Stephen Hawking and other scientists fear that as human developers improve AI, the capabilities of the bots will rise exponentially in an “intelligence explosion”. The bots already have capabilities that scientists thought would take 20 years to achieve. Despite glitches and anomalies, bots threaten to quickly achieve levels of intelligence several times higher than that of humans. Will such super-intelligent entities be content to serve inferior humans? Will they not seek to become controllers and not the controlled?

Chatbots are tiny programs that help simulate interactions with customers automatically based on a set of predefined conditions, triggers, and/or events. That can be a word, a whole sentence, a PDF file, and the information sent through clicking a button or selecting a card. Once the user input is gathered, it's saved in the Archives.

Today, chatbots are used in a wide variety of industries and for diverse purposes. Many businesses use chatbots and AI in customer service for routing contacts or gathering information. Other revenue-focused teams use chatbots to more efficiently qualify leads and drive large sales pipelines.

Recently, 1,000 technology leaders including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Andrew Yang warned in an open letter that artificial intelligence posed a profound, existentialist threat to the human race, and must immediately be regulated.

Chatbot technology is evolving at a rapid pace and the notion that chatbots and conversational AI systems will one day turn against us and pose a threat to humanity is largely a work of science fiction. While there are valid concerns about the potential risks associated with advanced AI systems, these concerns can be mitigated by responsible development, regulation, and ethical use of AI technology.

S Mohini Ratna, Editor, VARINDIA