It's sometimes difficult for the general public
to get a sense of how far we have come with Artificial Intelligence.
Some of the accounts of what we're getting up to
are sort of hyperbolic,
the storytelling about AI also
includes quite how far the technology has come,
but in some certain circumstances we're already
seeing what could be called 'super intelligent AI',
in the sense that the system that played GO
against Lee Sedol was far greater in intelligence
and its ability to play GO, because of its system,
the way in which it played games against itself
over and over again, that's not something that a human can specifically replicate,
but then again in some other cases Artificial Intelligence
is actually spectacularly dumb
by human standards. It doesn't have anything
like what we would call common sense and may
actually make some quite simple mistakes.
The danger arises though, that some of those mistakes can be
harmful to humans in the decisions that being made about them.
I don't think AI machines are getting very human at all.
All they can ever do is appear to be human, so it's the outward appearance. It can act,
perhaps, like a human would act. They can come up with answers that we would
perhaps expect a human to give, but that doesn't make them human. It just gives them
the outward appearance of a certain aspect of humanity, which is mostly
connected to our cognitive abilities and the use of language perhaps.
Oh I don't think we have come very far at all in
terms of these machines actually being human-like.
In fact, it is the case that with all the things
that we use to test machines on, to see if they
can do something as well as a human or better than
a human, we have very frequently discovered that
we can make machines that are as good as, or
better than a human, at a very specific thing,
only to discover that the machine comes to that in a way that is completely different
from how humans get to it.
So we can teach a computer to play chess, but it plays chess in
a completely different way from humans and the
same goes for all the games that we have trained
AI to play by now, but also things like image recognition or speech recognition.
It can only be taught to AI, in a sense, by just feeding it hundreds, thousands,
millions of examples, whereas we know that that's
not how humans work, it's not how humans learn.
So perhaps, we could even say that the more we get machines to
do things that we think are extremely uniquely human, the more we discover
that there are many, many different paths to
achieving that, that are not necessarily human.
So the field of Artificial Intelligence paradoxically has made the field of
human psychology all the more vibrant, because we're
starting to understand ourselves a bit better by
realising the difficulty there is to create an artificial human,
in other words Artificial Intelligence. And so, I think that's
renewing our admiration, our appreciation, of how mother nature and evolution has
created this incredible human brain,
which does all these remarkable things, that we just take for granted
because we all have one
and we don't realise exactly how complicated it really is.
Learning from the process of trying to build
an AI has taught us a lot also about what makes
us uniquely human what makes us so weird and
unusual that we can't just build a machine to
replicate all that. We can't even build a machine
to replicate a toddler, or a tiny baby, nothing
that is wholly human-like and I think the further we explore that, the more resources
we put into that, and still don't get there,
the more we can see how special we are as humans.
It does make us question in a certain way what it means to be human
and I think the way it does that is that for a long time
we thought to distinguish ourselves from
other beings, which in the past used to be
non-human animals, through something
and that 'something', that most conspicuous something, was intelligence.
A certain ability to think
conceptually and that is a hallmark of humanity or
used to be for a long time, but now we have those
sort of intelligent machines that do certain cognitive tasks much better than we,
so we cannot really define ourselves anymore through our intelligence
and I think that makes us wonder whether it
might not be something else that actually makes
us who we are as human beings. Might be emotions,
might be certain kind of emotions, like empathy,
might be our ability to act morally and to think and feel morally,
so there are other things besides our cognitive
abilities that we now, in order to distinguish
ourselves from the machines we create, we think might be what makes us human.