The Future Role of Artificial Intelligence in Our Evolving World

The Human race has domineered over this planet for the best part of 200,000 years. In the 4 billion year history of the earth we have transformed our environment to cater for us in every conceivable way. We’ve built cities, cathedrals, palaces and monuments; we’ve re-moulded this planet to suit our every need, and utilised many natural resources in the process.

Our superior brain, in comparison with other animals, allows us to view the world in a very different way. It allows us to anticipate challenges before they happen, communicate complex ideas, and produce incredible machines to aid us in our never-ending quest for betterment.

Our curiosity knows no bounds and we are continuously looking for new ways to innovate, new toys to marvel at and new devices to make our lives easier. Every invention, both big and small, once existed inside the mind of a person who had a vision, learnt from their mistakes, and never gave up. There was once a time when people thought it impossible that any man could take to the skies.

People would say that it was simply not possible for man to “imitate the bird”. However that all changed in 1903 when the Wright brothers invented the first successful airplane. Now, as I am sat here writing this, just over a hundred years later, there are currently 10,593 commercial airplanes in our atmosphere.

How did I know that? Well, fifty years ago maybe one would assume that I was simply guessing, or that I was some sort of omnipotent air traffic controller, but of course, I just simply asked Google the question. This just goes to show how our ability to obtain and share information has evolved tremendously over the last century. Huge leaps in technological innovation have led to fundamental changes in how we function as a global society.

In the 1960’s they had computers that took up the space of half a small building. Nowadays, the systems in our smartphones are not only thousands of times more powerful, but also cost a tiny fraction of the price. This is just one example of how quickly our advancement has been in relation to the increasing power of the microchip. Often when a new invention is conceived, there is what’s known as the “eureka moment”. Suddenly the whole world finds itself on the cusp of a revolutionary invention and we ask ourselves, “what now?”. Soon after this moment we quickly become masters in this new field. We continually build upon on our creation again and again until the original design becomes almost obsolete, rendered useless by the new expectations with which we have set ourselves.

One such creation is the widespread use of artificial intelligence, and it’s changing the world as we know it.

What is Machine Learning?

What’s the driving force for human curiosity and ingenuity? What keeps us constantly evolving? How is it that we are now able to harness something similar to the human brain within our computers and smart phones?

To begin to best understand this concept we should start by taking a look back at the “Turing Test”, which was developed in 1950 by pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing. The test was designed to assess whether or not a machine was capable of intelligent behaviour. A participant would be placed inside a room by themselves and in another room would be two other players, a real person and a computer.

The participant does not know which player is a computer, and which is the real person. It is their task to ask questions to both players and figure out which one is the computer. Of course the machine is trying to deceive the participant by responding in such a way as to be indistinguishable from that of a human.

If the participant cannot reliably tell the machine apart from the human, the machine is then said to have passed the test. As the years have gone by the Turing test has been carried out with ever advancing Artificial intelligence. For example at a competition in London a computer Chat-bot masqueraded itself as a 13 year old Ukrainian boy, fooling 43 percent of the expert judges into thinking it was a human being.

However it is important to note that just because a piece of A.I software passes the Turing test, does not mean that this is directly correlational with its level of intelligence.

Most A.I researchers now are less focused on producing clever conversationalists and more on developing intelligent systems that simply make people’s lives easier. At the moment we use a variety of programs that utilise A.I. Things such as Siri, Google and the GPS systems in our cars. We also now expect our Smartphone’s to understand our speech, and to recommend us things that we like.

Developments in the 21st Century

Nowadays mobile phone developers are producing increasingly better systems in order to understand our intentions and perform given commands at a greater efficiency.

Beyond the software that is readily available to the general public however, there have been many interesting experiments from around the world. Google for example created a machine that beat the world champion of the ancient board game GO.

Of course computer systems have long been able to tackle the challenge of board games, starting with noughts crosses in the 1950’s, to chess in the 1990’s. In chess the number of possible moves is about twenty for the average position, in GO however, that figure jumps to around 200. 

AlphaGo is Googles A.I program that they designed in order to see if a computer could beat a world champion at the game for the first time. It succeeded, beating the champ five times in a row. This was made possible by an algorithm that logged every single possible move, and the computer then learnt to incrementally improve itself by learning from its mistakes.

This is essentially what A.I is. It’s a set of systems that learn and improve upon a given task, all without any human intervention.

Another project known as Magnetea aims to find out whether a computer can create art and music, and in 2012, Google dedicated 16,000 computers to mimic aspects of the human brain. The research continues to this day.

However despite these programs displaying intelligence, they can still only perform within their set tasks, therefore their intelligence only exists within a narrow framework.

A much more interesting concept is one of a generalized intelligence, something that has an awareness of the self and others around them.

Ben Goertzel, the chairman of the A.I software company Novamente LLC, believes that understanding the human brain is fundamental when creating an A.I program.

He believes that the mind, in its most basic form, is a pattern recognition system. He theorises that if a computer can better understand the patterns within its own behaviour, and also how that behaviour impacts on their environment, then a machine will truly be intelligent.

A basic example of this is an experiment that can be seen on YouTube performed at the Ransselaer Polytechnic Institute in the US. Three robots are each given a 'pill' (which is actually a tap on the head) and two of the “pills” render the robots silent and unable to speak. The other “pill” is merely a placebo.

The tester then asks the three robots which pill they received. There's silence for a little while, and then one of the robots gets up and declares "I don't know!" But at the sound of its own voice, it quickly understands the concept of the game and changes its mind. It puts its hand in the air. "Sorry, I know now, I was able to prove that I was not given the pill."

This may seem pretty simple, but for robots, this is one of the hardest tests to pass. It not only requires the A.I to be able to listen and understand the question, but also to then be able to recognize its own voice and recognize that it is distinct from the other robots. It then needs to link that realization back to the original question to come up with an answer. There are certainly many exciting technological developments occurring right now, especially in connection with 5G and the concept of “smart cities”. It’s clear that we are still only beginning to scratch the surface when it comes to machine learning.

What Does the Future Hold?

Well it’s not all about robots. There are potential uses in molecular technology. These could allow us to change our organic material and provide incredible benefits in the medical profession. Brain computer interfacing, which would allow us to connect our minds to computers, allowing us to predict various neurological diseases and potentially advance our own cognition.

There are even talks about one day being able to download memories, or being able to upload our consciousness to a computer system. Cough Elon Musk.

Of course with all this power comes tremendous responsibility, and like anything, has both the ability to either work with us as a collective, or to ultimately work against us.

A.I is already replacing the need for human labour. For example Boston Consulting Group predicts that by 2025, up to a quarter of jobs will be replaced by either smart software or robots, while a study from Oxford University has suggested that 35% of existing UK jobs are at risk of automation within the next 20 years.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil also has some interesting predictions about our technological advancements over the next 50 years. He believes that by the year 2030, we will have reverse engineered the human brain. If made possible this would surely open up the floodgates to many of those ideas that seem straight out of a science fiction movie.

Mr Kurzweil has developed a term called “technological singularity”. This is a term that in part is borrowed from the world of physics in order to describe a particular point where machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence. The definition of this term is: “A future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed”.

Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives. Everything from our business models, to the way we interact with one another, possibly even death itself. Sounds crazy right?

Its statements like Kurzweil’s that are disconcerting, but that are also necessary when beginning to understand the impact that this technology will have.  Despite all of A.I’s countless uses and future uses it is also volatile and hard to predict.

The question still remains over whom do we hand over control of this tech? What kinds of regulations are necessary, and can we really trust any one corporation or Government to use such power wisely?

The potential for A.I technology is unlike anything we have ever come across before, and it will surely drastically alter life as we know it. It conjures up an absurd amount of questions regarding the economy, morality and ethics.

Whether or not a machine will always have our best interests at heart, and whether super intelligent machines are something we really desire or need, is still yet to be determined. Regardless of this however it is inevitable that A.I will play an ever increasing role in our lives, and how we adapt to such change, may be a challenge that defines a generation.