Tuesday, 5 March 2013

Ø What are the Major Challenges?
Ø What are the Main Techniques? 
Ø Where are we failing, and why?
Ø Step back and look at the Science
Ø Step back and look at the History of AI
Ø What are the Major Schools of Thought?
Ø What of the Future?
Ø “It is very difficult to make an accurate prediction, especially about the future.”
Ø Main sources of predictions:
§  AI Academics
§  Science Fiction Writers
§  Often correct…
§  1945: geostationary satellites as telecommunications relays
Ø BBC interview with Rodney Brooks and Ray Kurzweil
Ø Interviewer:
Ø Will our hyper-intelligent coffee makers in 2050 suddenly decide to kill us like HAL in 2001?
Or will humans be made redundant by a legion of intelligent machines?
Ø Response:
Ø No. We will not wake up one day to find our lives populated with all manner of artificially intelligent devices…
Ø Despite the rapid advance of technology, the advent of strong AI will be a gradual process.

By 2020…
Ø Today, via loyalty cards shop’s computers predict your purchase and order
Ø Soon… routine insurance claims/loans will be assessed entirely using AI
Ø Intelligent agents cut out direct human input
Ø key activities such as surveillance, security, and tracking
Ø No humans need to be involved
Ø technology will generate dangers not recognised
Ø …until it is impossible to reverse them
Ø on a "J" curve of continued acceleration of change
Compiled reactions from the 742 respondents:
42% agreed
54% disagreed
4% did not respond
The 2006 Pew Internet & American Life/Elon University Predictions Survey
The Matrix Scenario
Ø AI technology able to replace humans at work
Ø Massive unemployment?
Ø People gradually spend more and more time in Virtual Worlds
Ø Eventually forget about “real” world
Ø Example: World of Warcraft has over 9M subscribers
§  More than the population of many countries
§  June 2005 child died due to neglect by her World of Warcraft-addicted parents in Korea
Rise of the machines?

In the future envisaged by the movies, technology is out to destroy us. But could it really happen?
The only reason to fear technology is because it enables people to do bad things to each other ...
but that's happened throughout history.
It's just that the means have arguably become more sophisticated.
Matthew Kirkcaldie
Rise of the machines?
Ø (fiction) Skynet is a computer-based defense system
Ø Placed in control of all U.S. Military's weaponry
Ø Remove possibility of human error
Ø Skynet became self-aware
Ø (there exist a number of sci-fi stories on a similar theme)
Ø Credible?
Rise of the machines - credible?
Ø Much AI research is funded by military
Ø USS Vincennes – was put down to human error
Ø What if it had been computer controlled?
Ø As AI improves – tendency to give it more control
§  Especially in time-critical situations
Ø …machines in control of military hardware seems credible
Ø Machines losing the plot?
§  Humans sometimes do… after millions of years of evolution…
§  Maybe even more likely for machines
§  But machines unexpectedly becoming intelligent/sentient probably unlikely
Singularity:
Ø The technological singularity
§  Hypothesized creation of smarter-than-human entities
§  Machine can keep augmenting their own mental abilities
§  Seed AI
§  “The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make”Irving Good
§  Rapidly accelerate technological progress
§  Human beings no longer capable of participating
Ø What does "smarter-than-human" really mean?
§  We don't know because we're not that smart
Ø What happens after the Singularity?
§  Nobody knows
§  our model of the future breaks down
Ø Credible? Some would say ability to predict improves
TRANS HUMANISM:
Ø Defined in 1957 by Aldous Huxley’s brother Julian Huxley 
“man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his ‘human nature’”
Ø The use of new sciences and technologies
§  to enhance human mental and physical abilities and aptitudes
§  ameliorate undesirable and unnecessary aspects
§  stupidity, suffering, disease, aging and involuntary death.
Ø Technologies
§  Genetic engineering
§  Implants, robotic prostheses
§  Nanotechnology
§  Drugs
§  Possibly uploading personality to a non-biological substrate


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