AI Artificial Intelligence:
MohammedAbbas Khaku (Allentown, USA) is the past president of Al Ahad Islamic Center in Allentown. He is a Social and criminal justice writer and regularly writes for a number of international publications. He is the Senior Derivatives Financial Analyst at Freddie Mac and holds the ODE Economic Honors Society associated with Moravian University
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I represents a profound change in the history of life on earth and should be planned for and managed with care as it could be a threat to humanity or a blessing.
During my visit to the UAE, I was told to visit the “Museum of the Future” and around the same time, I was supposed to submit this article on Artificial Intelligence (AI). I thought this would be a good resource for me to visit the museum, however, I did not get an opportunity to go there. I hear it is a must to visit. The Museum is a landmark for the UAE a platform to study the future with emphasis on AI. The concept of this museum is to help accelerate scientific development in the Muslim world.
What is ‘Artificial Intelligence’?
AI refers to systems (platforms) that display intelligent performance by analyzing their environment and taking actions – with some degree of autonomy – to achieve specific goals. AI focuses on the design of smart machines in making decisions with little or no human intervention. This is good as it forces change upon companies, workers, and society’s infrastructure. AI helps the industry to grow, increase sales, efficiency, reduce cost and enhance customer service. However, some jobs will be lost to AI technology. AI’s ability to monitor the global information systems from surveillance data, cameras, and mining social network communication has great potential for good and for bad. AI is already a reality, emerging in many countries across the globe, increasingly driven by digital data and technologies that are used to automate, predict, identify, survey, detect, target, and punish. As such, the use of AI in a manner to be described as the best thing that has happened to society seems dreadfully ignorant.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman said at a people analytics conference that he “is quite worried about AI’s dark, dystopian possibilities, despite its great potential for good. The better AI becomes at making decisions, the less we will need human judgment — and that, he suggested, will threaten the power structure in organizations.”
The optimism of Mao Zedong, the Chinese communist revolutionary, led to the Great Leap which resulted in things like the killing of birds to enhance production, yet getting swarms of locusts and famine in return. The cliché that comes to mind is the Terminator in old movies, representations of doom for humanity based on some humans’ simple mistakes that we should or should not have made. If our governments and business institutions do not spend time now formulating rules, regulations, and responsibilities, there could be significant negative ramifications as AI continues to grow.
What do the Quran and leading thinkers say about artificial intelligence?
The commentary of the 88th verse of the 17th chapter, Al-Isra, “If ?all? humans and jinn were to come together to produce the equivalent of this Quran, they could not produce its equal…”. Professor Stephen Hawking says that the creation of AI will be “either the best or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity.” World-renowned physicists and Islamic scholars have often been cautious about AI leading to its own destruction.
A number of pioneers from the technology industry, most famously Tesla CEO Elon Musk, have expressed concerns about the damage AI could inflict on humanity. He said AI is more dangerous than North Korea. Google CEO Sundar Pichai says that “A.I. is more important than fire or electricity and is going to have a bigger impact on the world.”
AI is the biggest event in the history of civilization and is very exciting, but it has its limitations, which present grave dangers given its unethical use. The academic as well as many faith scholars are warning about the potential dangers of AI as well as the potential benefits. AI can be of enormous benefit and positive impact on the lives of people with disabilities and can eradicate disease and poverty.
AI has helped enhance photography, and translate many languages and people use it billions of times a day. AI research will continue to grow and move forward. It has the potential to make our lives even better in the future, especially in the medical field. However, we need to move with ethical responsibility. AI brings huge potential benefits however, many have concerns about the social, ethical, and legal aspects of AI systems. AI is now becoming an information channel of propaganda and untruthful news.
Many academics and religious scholars are focused on the doom and gloom of AI. However, consider if a meteor was to hit planet Earth, and it is not inconceivable. Three asteroids zoomed past Earth in October 2019, one it is said with only 24-hour notice. AI could be of great benefit to avoid millions of deaths. The use of AI to predict earthquakes, and other climate-related events would save millions of lives and property.
Who created AI and who has the smartest AI technology?
Alan Mathison Turing, a British computer scientist and logician and Geoffrey Hinton, an ex-Google employee were the pioneers among many others. Google DeepMind computer program AlphaGo is considered to be one of the most intelligent AI systems in the industry at present time.
Which country has the most advanced AI in the world?
The US is the clear leader in AI development with tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft at the forefront of AI-driven research. However, AI is governed by the Matthew effect: “To those who have everything more will be given; from those who have nothing everything will be taken.” One can see the compensation of the CEO of big tech.
Whether AI will have a negative or positive effect is not the issue. It is rather in the understanding that human beings have of it, in the concept that we have (or will have) of it.
Iran is the leader in the global AI race.
The US. Department of Defense proposed USD 927 million for AI, proxy warfare and cyber warfare specially targeted toward the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Anglo-Saxon imperialist colonial Zionist US Foreign policy has often been compared to moves, sequences of moves, and games of chess. Forty-four years of sanctions and Executive Orders by numerous US administrations help maintain American Leadership in AI and sabotage the Iran platform on AI.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has become the latest country to adopt AI technologies in its military, according to reports. The Research Institute of Information and Communication Technology suggests Iran will be among the top ten in AI. Today it ranks 13th in the world for AI in terms of research publications ranking higher than Brazil, Netherlands, and Russia. While China is expected to double its investment in AI to nearly USD 27 billion by 2026.
Furthermore, Iran’s Islamic Azad University is ranked the fifth most productive institution in AI research in the world. U.S. News has published that the best global Universities in Iran are Islamic Azad and Tehran University which attained a global score of over 62.00.
In 2016 World Economic Forum ranked Iran the fifth biggest producer of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) with 335,000 Iranian graduates (60% female) after China, India, US. and Russia. Most of these graduates are engineers who can contribute to AI research.
In 2018, more than seventy state and private universities in Iran offered majors in AI and robotics. Iran’s 90 million population has the top fifty websites according to Alexa, and only five are foreign. This is because of the independence, dignity, knowledge and self-sufficiency viewpoint of Imam Khomeini.
Re-imposed sanctions by the US have severely damaged the Iranian economy. One sector that is still thriving is emerging technologies. The Iranian AI-powered navigation app BALAD hit a record 1.2 million downloads within a few days of its launch in March.
AI Iran is not limited to BALAD. The establishment of the Ministry of Artificial Intelligence has sharply reduced Iran’s reliance on oil exports and talked about a Robotic Army for use in all industries from medicine to tourism. This provides access to information not necessarily available in other countries where the Internet is dominated by international giants who use algorithms in favour of Zionist Israel and promote Islamophobia.
Apart from AI research, many applications have been developed domestically. Tehran’s traffic control heavily relies on License Plate Recognition (LPR) technologies developed domestically. The most successful story for Iran in this field is a 15-kilometre test of an autonomous vehicle in laboratory conditions in 2017.
According to a US Geological Survey, over 8.5 million tons of lithium have been found in Hamedan, a mountainous province in the country’s west. This is the second-largest lithium reserve in the world after Chile.
What a coincidence with the announcement of the lithium discovery, there was a drone attack on a drone factory in Isfahan and the so-called Mahsa Amini Hijab riots created by US and Zionists. It was all propaganda because I was there during that time. One wonders why the riots in Zionist Israel are off the radar. The demonstrations in Israel are real with millions of people while the Iran demonstrations had a few hundred only but receive 24/7 coverage by the Zionist media.
Lithium is a key element in batteries for electric vehicles. Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) introduced an EV named Now-Yuz in 2018 with an electric motor in the rear axle. IRI will get help from China in making electric vehicles that will cut air pollution and the Ministry of Transportation has ambitious plans to facilitate and encourage the use of EVs in the country.
Numerous companies in IRI have developed face recognition and iris recognition software while in the finance sector, the first algorithmic trading was held last year in Tehran. Not surprisingly, Iran has directed large investments in AI to the military and security fields. Iran’s rapid advances in drones and cyber technologies are the biggest concern for the Pentagon.
Senior officials were briefed last month by the Biden administration’s first Iran-focused classified session on the scientific development by Iran in the field of AI-powered miniature drones, unmanned midget submarines, auto-run mine detectors and six-wheeled tank robots fitted with small arms for defence purposes. AI is Iran’s force multiplier with asymmetric military capabilities.
The use of AI will play an increasingly vital role in military operations. With the coming of Mahdi and the Intezar-e-Mahdi, Muslim Ummah will need AI specialists and cyber specialists to diffuse nuclear bombs or destroy aircraft/submarines before taking off, not infantry.
The use of AI is nothing new to Iran. Due to 44 years of sanctions, Iran has become a leader in AI innovation. This is a major concern for the Pentagon and Zionist Israel.
The US. Journal of Military Science and Technology gives high marks to Iran’s use of AI in the development of integrated data processing platforms to help guide high-level military decisions. Gen. Michael E Kurilla who took the helm at Central Command (CENTCOM) says that Iran is well ahead of many countries in the field of AI. While the Google CEO has mentioned that Iran is so far advanced in AI technology that it could hack into US drones and land it safely.
Iran’s AI use is for positive contribution to their economic, financial, healthcare, and defensive purposes only. Iranian military officials envisage AI tools as helping them to overcome persistent threats by the US, Zionist Israel, and Europeans as an insurance policy. Strategic thinkers and scientists in Iran have said that AI is the key to future military superiority. Iranian thinkers have two messages:
First, the rapid development of AI-enabled tools is critical to the future and efforts by the US or Zionist to limit this pursuit should be resisted.
Secondly, the Iranian journal Islamic Law examines the use of AI in civil liberties, human rights, or WMD, and the Rahbar has issued an edict (fatwa) prohibiting such kinds of warfare or the use of AI.
AI centralization will allow Iranian forces to integrate AI tools more easily into their command systems in real-time and avoid human error, for example mistakenly shooting down a Ukraine passenger plane.
There is no good or bad or right or wrong, nor a curse or blessing when it comes to AI. What we know is that it is developing at an exponential rate. Is AI the good, the bad, and needed, no one can foresee, It is barely predictable, and we, as human beings can be excited and enthusiastic about the future for many innovations to come.
In the struggle for peace through Justice.
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