The goal of AI is to make a computer that’s as smart as a human.
If you read Youtube comments, that shouldn’t be too hard.
Hello artificial intelligencia, Julian here for DNews.
Computers are constantly getting better, faster, and stronger, and they’re really great at
things we’re terrible at.
For example, tell me what’s 1,957 times 683?
Right now.
Go!
I didn’t think so.
And yet we still consider them dumb.
If being amazing at raw calculations doesn’t make them smart, at what point is a machine
considered intelligent?
The most famous test of artificial intelligence is the Turing Test.
Basically a computer passes the Turing Test if it can chat with a human judge for 5 minutes
and fool the judge into thinking it’s human 30% of the time.
Aside from one controversial effort in 2014 where a chatbot snuck past the judges by lowering
expectations, the Turing Test remains unbeaten.
That might be in part because not many people are trying to beat it.
The Turing Test isn’t broad enough in scope to be the be-all end-all benchmark for AI.
For example it doesn’t test if a machine can make a judgment about an image, or use
common-sense reasoning.
So more challenges have been set forth, and little by little machines are starting to
pass them.
Researchers think an intelligent machine should be able to interpret visual information, like
when something is a face.
Lo and behold, on my phone I have an app that knows what shapes to search for when I’m
taking selfies so it can slap dog ears on me.
Computers are also beating us at our own games lately.
Google’s Alpha Go, an algorithm that played the ancient Chinese game of Go like a boss,
was good enough to beat a Go master.
And playing Go like a pro and recognizing my face is impressive, but a machine that
does one specific thing at a human level can’t really be called intelligent.
We call that Artificial Narrow Intelligence, when really what we’re looking for is Artificial
General Intelligence.
To meet that standard, a machine would have to do many things at our level.
So the human standard for intelligence is to be like a human, which sounds egotistical
but it’s really not.
The human mind is formidable because we can learn about so many completely unrelated things,
and we can do it even if we’re not explicitly taught.
One person is capable of playing Go and recognizing faces and having an open-ended conversation.
One computer is not.
That’s where machine learning comes in.
Today computers can teach themselves.
Given enough data, modern algorithms can start to write their own code, refining it over
and over.
The most basic facial recognition code an algorithm writes might look for simple things
like edges.
The next level adds the ability to combine those edges into shapes like circles and rectangles.
Go a layer deeper and it can start to distinguish eyes and noses.
These algorithms need to look at thousands to millions of examples of faces, but eventually
their codes will be so good at looking for facial features that they’ll be able to
tell when two pictures are of the same person, even if the lighting has changed, the angles
is different, and they’ve grown a sexy beard.
It’s why Facebook knows your friends are in a picture before you even tag them.
It’s because they have a virtual book… of faces.
A smart machine will not just recognize specific people, but also be able to generalize.
Even if a face looks like nothing they’ve ever seen before, they’ll still recognize
this ugly mug as human.
Not a sloth.
Eventually if a machine can teach itself many different human traits and has the raw horsepower
to do it quickly, it’ll be considered artificially intelligent.
But I doubt it’ll stop there.
It won’t be long before they surpass human intelligence and obtain “Artificial Superintelligence.”
When that day comes, maybe it’ll be the machines that test humans to see if we can
fool them.
You know the routine: anytime someone brings up AI we all have to freak out about how they’ll
be our overlords.
Of course there’s another way of looking at it- What if humanity and AI merge together?
Laura Ling from Seeker Stories explores that question in this video, wherein a robot tells
a joke.
But convinced that AI is going to be safe, Trace shills for our robot overlords, I mean
protectors, in this video here.
After AI hits but before it enslaves humanity it’s going to have all sorts of uses.
Safer self driving cars, better internet searches, you name it.
No I mean it, tell us where you think AI will have the most impact on the world.
Let us know down in the comments, subscribe for more and I'll see you all next time on
DNews.