May 11, 2020 - IELTS BAND7

IELTS Essay: Computers will be more intelligent than human beings

May 11, 2020 IELTS Research

WRITING TASK 2 Computers will be more intelligent than human beings

You should spend 40 minutes on this task.

Write about the following topic:

Some scientists believe that very soon computers will be more intelligent than human beings. Some people think that this will be a positive development, while others worry it will have negative effects.

What are your opinions on this?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Write at least 250 words.

Sample Answer:

Human civilization has developed at a staggering pace in the last century. We went from not having sliced bread to being on the path to having supercomputers more powerful than we can comprehend. There is indeed a common presumptuous notion out there; that one-day computers might become ‘more intelligent than human beings’.

The amount of ignorance this specific thought conveys leaves me quite inarticulate. Firstly, computers are digital, brains are analogue. There is no conceivable way to compare these two. Computers are highly logical machines designed to perform tasks; humans are essentially a tangled mass of neurons behaving in an unpredictable manner, which births thoughts, emotions and ideas. Their core functions are polar opposites.

The issue that must be addressed is the highly misdirecting role of movies and entertainment media in presenting Artificial Intelligence as ‘self-sufficient’ and ‘intelligent’ in the manner of independent thought processing. One cannot press this enough; but machines will never aim for world domination. They have been created for one purpose and one purpose only, to aid humanity.

The world’s fastest computer averages out at 200 petaflops, the human brain has been estimated to run at one exaflop. The difference between them is akin to the earth and sky. Nonetheless, I do not doubt the gap will be closed within the next decade. However, this will just mean that supercomputers will be more efficient at the analysis tasks they perform, this will not mean that they will spontaneously decide to sprout a conscience and destroy the world in the blink of an eye. This idea is so ridiculous it has passed the point of comedic hilarity into plain oblivion and beyond even idiosyncrasy.

I refuse to even acknowledge such a possibility. Computers becoming more efficient than human processing power would be a leap in the fields of data analysis, weather prediction, space calculation, molecular modeling, natural resource exploration, etc. There is absolutely no cause for worry, fear or panic. Only further awareness on the true nature of computers and the fictionality of popular media tropes.

In conclusion, it is inevitable that computers will become more efficient. There are very little drawbacks to this save for initial job losses, the positives outweigh the negatives in all formulate-able aspects.

Staggering	very shocking and surprising
Comprehend	to understand something completely
Presumptuous	Showing little respect for others by doing things they have no right to do
Notion	a belief or idea
Inarticulate	unable to express feelings or ideas clearly, or expressed in a way that is difficult to understand
Conceivable	possible to imagine or to believe
Misdirecting	to use something in a way that is not right or legal
Petaflops	a unit of computing speed equal to one thousand million million (10¹⁵) floating-point operations per second.
Exaflop	a billion billion calculations per second (10¹⁸)
Comedic	relating to or involving comedy
Hilarity	a situation in which people laugh very loudly and think something is very funny
Oblivion	the state of being completely forgotten
Idiosyncrasy	a strange or unusual habit, way of behaving, or feature that someone or something has
Media tropes	something such as an idea, phrase, or image that is often used by the media
Fictionality	the quality of being fictional (= imaginary)
Inevitable	Certain to happen