At a recent meeting, the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) was raised. Apparently, some people are very afraid of the effects of this technology. As an experienced IT systems engineer, I would like to share some of my thoughts on this here. If you are one of those people who are worried, I can assure you that AI is anything but intelligent. It is as dumb as a post. What is now called artificial "intelligence" is nothing more than a statistical analysis tool. This software reads a huge amount of texts written by humans, analyses them, creates statistics on the use of words and word combinations and then writes texts that sound as plausible as possible. These should look as if they were written by humans. The AI has no understanding of the content of the texts. It has no idea what it is reading and does not understand the meaning of what it is writing. This has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence. It's pure maths. It only gives the impression that it is producing something meaningful because it is imitating human behaviour. It is not capable of creating something new on its own.

AI can be used perfectly to optimise existing concepts and systems, as is done on the stock exchange and in engineering, for example. This involves optimising the underlying mathematical formulas. When an AI creates a forecast, it does so by analysing the available historical data and then creating a mathematical model of the future based on the past. The concepts that are programmed into the AI for this process all come from humans. Which data is made available to the AI for its training is also determined by humans. There is a huge potential for abuse here. If I want to generate a certain result, all I have to do is ensure that the original data shows the corresponding statistical trend. Since the AI only sees what I show it, it will logically calculate a future scenario based on my input. It can't do anything else because it has no idea about the data that I have withheld from it. It can generate any forecast I want. This has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence. It doesn't even have anything to do with reality. The only decisive factors are the input data and the mathematical model of the calculation. This is a great way to sell lies to people. Whoever controls the AI determines what it outputs. If people believe that the AI is intelligent, they will fall for the scam.

ChatGPT is currently the best-known AI. If you search the Internet for "ChatGPT fails", you will find hundreds of pages describing these defects. See for example here, here and here. There was recently the case of a teacher who was accused by ChatGPT of having molested his female students on an excursion. The AI had even written an entire CV. It's just a shame that this trip never actually took place. It's easy to explain how this happened. The system reads news texts on the internet. School excursions are never mentioned in the media unless something bad has happened. In other words, the AI knows nothing about all the trips where nothing bad happens. It simply assumes that such assaults are completely normal and builds this idea into the teacher's CV. The information is wrong. But ChatGPT doesn't understand this because it doesn't understand the words used. It simply produces a text that is similar to the ones it has previously read. This applies to all outputs of today's AI systems. They are as dumb as a post and produce a load of rubbish. If something clever does come out of it, it's only because a human has already answered the question correctly and this information was available to the AI for statistical analysis.

So should we be worried that AI could be more intelligent than us humans? No, definitely not. If anything, we should be concerned about the people who feed AI with data and try to convince us that it is intelligent. Real intelligence involves more than just mathematical computing power. Computers have already surpassed us in this respect. And that's a good thing. That's why we use them. But they can't cover the rest, because they can't do anything other than maths.

Do I need to worry about my job? Well, if the work can be done more efficiently by computers and robots, you can assume that it will be done by them in the future. This mainly applies to monotonous, repetitive tasks for which you don't need a brain. However, as soon as human characteristics such as creativity, inventiveness, empathy and emotional intelligence are required, AI will not be able to take over. This cannot be programmed, as these characteristics cannot be described using mathematical models. I think that in the future we will have to deal less with soulless tasks at work and instead be able to bring our humanity to bear more. This development is definitely positive. The only question is how we deal with the change. Fear is certainly a bad precondition for securing a place in society where you can contribute your individual skills. A proactive approach is called for. We shape our own future. Waiting for industrial employers to create the right jobs for all of us will not work. We have to do it ourselves. And this is precisely the beauty of this development. We have the chance to create something new and dismantle the old slave structures. Get out of your comfort zone and embark on the adventure!