Top 10 Amazing (Somewhat Terrifying) Facts about
AI
10.
Most AI is “Female”
One thing
that you may have noticed when it comes to AI that you possibly interact with,
like Google Now, Siri, and Cortana, that the default voice is female.
For the record, this isn’t one of the terrifying facts; we just find it fascinating that AI
tends to be female.
Why is that, exactly?
Well, there’s no specific reason but a few factors play into it.
For example, studies have shown that males and females both like the sound of female
voices a bit better.
Another reason, according to Karl Fredric MacDorman, a computer scientist and expert
in human-computer interaction at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, is that mostly men
work on AI so they probably find females attractive and want their AI to follow suit.
Kathleen Richardson, a social anthropologist, said that female AI would be less threatening
than male AI.
For example, compare Samantha in Her to the Terminator machines.
Well, except for Terminator 3, but then again, who the hell actually remembers that movie?
9.
Artificial Intelligence Pets
Pets are great, but they have a number of downsides.
You have to clean up after them, they can be destructive, they need to be fed, and of
course, they die.
Something that will take care of all those downsides is AI driven pets.
University of Melbourne animal welfare researcher Dr. Jean-Loup Rault says that there are already
a number of patents for robot pets and they could be widely available by 2025.
Rault says that in the next 10-15 years, developers will work on a number of aspects of AI and
robotics so that manufacturers will be able to build pet-bots that people will be able
to make an emotional connection with.
Rault believes that robotic pets will be one of the only viable options for most people
as the world gets more populated.
He theorized that by 2050, only the incredibly wealthy will be able to afford real live pets.
8.
Artificial Intelligence Can Repair Itself
On the terrifying end of the spectrum, there was a paper published this year about a robot
that could rebuild itself, even after losing two of its six legs.
The robot doesn’t know what’s broken, but notices that its performance has dropped.
Then, using an algorithm based on trial and error, the robot can figure out what’s wrong
and how to repair itself.
The researchers who developed the robot said that as it fixes itself, it updates its database
with all the things that will not work in a phase called “simulated childhood.”
This phase lasts for a few minutes and during that time, the robot processes 13,000 possible
movements.
Those movements are pulled from 10^47 different behaviors, which is an unfathomable number.
For a comparison, that’s how many atoms make up the Earth.
The implications of this type of artificial intelligence are essentially limitless.
Some of the more exciting prospects include search and rescue and deep sea and space exploration.
7.
Artificial Intelligence Can Write
The first piece for a major news organization that was written by AI appeared on the Los
Angeles Times website after a newspaper article reading:
“A shallow magnitude 4.7 earthquake was reported Monday morning five miles [8km] from
Westwood, California, according to the US Geological Survey.
The temblor occurred at 6.25am Pacific time at a depth of 5.0 miles.
According to the USGS, the epicenter was six miles from Beverly Hills, California, seven
miles from Universal City, California, seven miles from Santa Monica, California, and 348
miles from Sacramento, California.
In the past 10 days, there have been no earthquakes magnitude 3.0 and greater centered nearby.
This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was created
by an algorithm written by the author.”
The computer was able to write the article based on data that was pulled from seismographs,
which turned them into figures and then plugged those figures into a story.
The technology was developed in part by Larry Birnbaum, a professor of journalism and the
head of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University.
He was one of the developers of the Quill system, which is an app for companies that
do minimal writing.
It takes statistics and graphs and compiles them into written reports.
As for creative writing, like novels and screenplays, that is the next step for AI, but it’s obviously
complicated.
Perhaps AI will start off at a Nicholas Sparks’ level and then work itself up from there.
6.
Artificial Intelligence can be a Fierce Poker Player
A big step in the evolution of AI was when IBM’s chess-playing Deep Blue computer beat
reigning world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.
Another milestone was in 2011 when IBM’s Watson appeared on Jeopardy and completely
destroyed some of the best Jeopardy contestants ever.
AI took another major step in May 2015, when a supercomputer called Claudico from Carnegie
Mellon University competed in a game of Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold ’em poker at the Rivers
Casino in Pittsburgh.
The tournament lasted two weeks and 80,000 hands were played.
In the end, Claudico came in fourth, and the “loss” was close enough to be considered
scientifically valid, meaning that statistically, Claudico tied his human competitors.
While it didn’t win, it was a big step in AI computing.
The big difference between a game like poker and playing chess or Jeopardy is that poker
has a lot of missing information, and bluffing is a major strategy and not a logical way
of thinking.
Researchers said that the tournament was a great start and they believe that by 2020,
AI will be able to beat the best poker players in the world.
This type of AI also has a number of other applications instead of just trying to clean
out casinos.
The algorithms used in Claudico will be applicable anywhere there is incomplete information,
including cyber security, medicine and negotiations.
5.
Romantic Relationships with Artificial Intelligence
HER
A question that’s bound to arise is that if AI is almost or completely indistinguishable
from humans, will humans be able to have physical and emotional relationships with AI entities?
David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands had an interesting, but
plausible, scenario where sex with a robot could become more mainstream.
He said that at first it will come across as geeky, but then a story will appear in
a publication like Cosmo in which someone will rave about how great sex with a robot
is, and the mainstream attention could alter the prevailing attitudes.
But how close are we to something like that?
Well, both Levy and Henrik Christensen, founder of the European Robotics Research Network,
thought that by 2012, humans would be having sex with robots.
We’re actually closer than you think, as there are currently a number of sex toys that
use robotics and promise pleasure like you’ve never experienced before.
As for serious relationships, like marriage, AI and Androids still need quite a few years
of advancement.
With that being said, Levy believes that by 2050, human and robot marriages will be made
legal.
Of course it could just be that Levy is way too big a fan of the movie Her.
4.
Artificial Intelligence Can Learn
There’s a saying about computers that they’re only as smart as the person using them.
However, with advancements with AI, computers are starting to learn by themselves.
For example, Google developed an AI system that taught itself to play Atari 2600 games.
After doing so, it beat some of the world’s best players.
Another learning AI system is an android developed by the United States Army that learned how
to cook from watching YouTube videos.
The robot was able to learn the skills from visual recognition and trial and error.
While it’s unlikely that the military will use robot chefs, cooking uses a wide arrange
of skills so it is an excellent demonstration of what the robot is capable of.
3.
AI Will Become Smarter Than Humans
With AI having the ability to learn, computers are getting to be pretty smart.
As of 2013, AI was about at the same intelligence level as a four-year-old and there have been
lots of advances since then.
For example, in 2014 a supercomputer cracked a complicated math problem called Erdos discrepancy
problem, which was published in 1930.
The amazing thing is that humans can’t even double check the solution because the equation
is too long.
The file is 13-gigabytes, and just for comparison, all of Wikipedia is about 10-gigbytes.
According to renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil, by 2029 AI will be at about the level of intelligent
adult humans.
Beyond that, anything is pretty much possible, especially if AI can get exponentially smarter.
For example, Kurzweil believes it could lead to something called singularity, which is
where humans and machines will meld into one entity.
2.
Nautilus
An interesting development in artificial intelligence is an SGI Altix supercomputer called Nautilus.
It appears that, to a certain degree, Nautlius can predict the future.
For example, it was able to predict where Osama bin Laden was hiding within 125 miles,
and was also able to predict the Arab Spring that started in December of 2010.
Nautilus gathered this information from over 100 million news articles from all over the
world dating back to 1945.
The articles would be analyzed for two different criteria: the mood of the article, and the
location of the story.
This information led to a web of 100 trillion relationships and the data was fed into Nautilus.
From that information, the computer was able to piece the information together and create
graphs that charted mood.
For example, with the Arab Spring, sentiment in the area was low before the protests.
The author of the findings, Kalev Leetaru from the University of Illinois’ Institute
for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Science, is looking at making the information
work in real time.
While Nautilus won’t exactly predict the future, it may give mood forecasts similar
to economic forecasts or weather reports.
1.
The AI Apocalypse
There’s little doubt that AI has the potential to greatly improve our lives.
AI will make the roads safer, help in medicine, aide the disabled and the elderly, work customer
service and a number of countless other jobs.
However, AI also poses an incredible threat, and this isn’t the stuff of science fiction,
either.
Top scientists and technologists like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk believe
that AI is a very real, and dangerous threat to humankind.
It’s so dangerous that Max Tegmark, a physicist at MIT, compared it to the development of
nuclear weapons and says we may only be able to do it right the first time.
In fact, there has been a push to actually slow down advancement on AI and focus more
on containment.
Containment is important because if we were to ever lose control of AI, we may never get
it back.
Then it’s just a matter of time, since the AI could wipe out humanity because it could
calculate that humans are a virus-like being, or it could kill humans as a way of self-preservation.
Essentially, AI will either fix all of our problems or destroy us all.
In other words, The Terminator and The Matrix aren’t nearly as farfetched as we previously
believed.