Artificial Intelligence: Friendly or Frightening?

http://www.livescience.com/49009-future-of-artificial-intelligence.html

Here is another great article on artificial intelligence. I enjoy this subject because it is in so many sci-fi stories and represents, to a large extent, the future of science. Worm holes, faster that light travel, aliens sucking out your brain are all possible but most likely they’re a ways off. AI is something that we’re toying with now and it already impacts us on a daily basis. In 20 or 30 years it will be a large part of our lives.

This article references a couple of other stories that I’ve passed on but it summarized some of Google’s efforts which I thought was interesting when put in context with Steven Hawking’s interview and the other AI efforts. It also talks about something interesting called the Turing test which I find a somewhat humorous test. Simply, the Turing test is having a bunch of scientist interact with a group of people and computers and by asking questions they’re supposed to pick if who they are interacting with is a computer or person. The press gets all excited and uses the results to scare us about AI. This year 33% of the scientist thought a computer posing as a foreign boy with limited English skills was a person when it was really a computer.

This is interesting but it doesn’t deserve the amount of hype that it gets from the press. It’s merely an interesting measure of how computers are progressing but it isn’t cause for concern.

One thing I did find interesting was Google’ work in deep learning which is something I’ve written about before and which I have in my series SIMPOC. Deep learning is a complex ability to recognize patterns then make judgment decisions with that information. Something the human brain excels at and something which computers aren’t doing well. The fact that Google was able to put 16,000 computers together and program it to recognize a cat, demonstrates the gap between computers and our brains.

I don’t think we’re at risk any time soon; but then again I’m not a cat.

 

Ray Jay Perreault

http://rayjayperreault.wordpress.com

SIMPOC at Amazon: http://amzn.com/B00KCAB6L0