AI: Machines that think

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the science and engineering of machines that act intelligently. A computer program that is capable of multiplying massive numbers and keeping track of thousands of bank balances is not an intelligent machine.

Most people involved in AI say that the official founding of this phenomenon started in a small workshop in 1956 at Dartmouth College, organized by a young mathematician named John McCarthy.

In 1955 at the age of 28, he joined the mathematics faculty at Dartmouth. However, even as an undergraduate, he had become intrigued with the idea of creating a thinking machine. The term “artificial intelligence” was McCarthy’s invention. He wanted to distinguish this new field from a related one called cybernetics. According to him, no one really liked the name since everyone’s goal was “genuine intelligence” and not “artificial.” But, he said, “I had to call it something so I called it Artificial Intelligence.” He then organized a group of four pioneers of this field. Aside from McCarthy, there were Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon.

What we are experiencing today is being referred to as the dawn of the age of AI, which is considered the defining trend of our times.

In the last decade, these “thinking machines” have been adapted to perform even more complex tasks that were once believed only humans could do. For example, this includes identifying people in a crowd to driving cars in heavy traffic to beating the best human players at chess and GO.

Thinking machines are not new and people have been trying to build computers that exhibit a certain level of intelligence the past seven to eight decades. But the concept of human-like automatons go back centuries.

The ongoing debate now is how much like human beings will AI become. Will it replace people, like replacing them in jobs, outperforming them in games and even pursuing creative fields like art and music that is supposed to give meaning to human lives?

Prominent scientists such as the late Stephen Hawking predicted that AI would be the end of humankind. Elon Musk said: ”We are summoning the demon.”

However, the task of converting a thinking machine into a parallel human being is not that easy. One of the major reasons is that making AI do the right thing is difficult when we don’t know what that might be.

In the real world, uncertainty takes many forms. It could be an opponent trying to prevent you from reaching your goal. It could be the repercussions of a decision you make which do not become apparent till much later. For example, you might swerve your car to avoid a collision without knowing if it is safe to do so. An intelligent machine must be capable of handling all these inputs and making decisions in a split second.

To approximate human intelligence, a thinking machine must have the capability to remodel the world or the environment in which the task is being undertaken. Only when a machine can make the right decision in uncertain circumstances can it be said to be intelligent.

Even today there is the growing fear of the societal effects of AI. The current Hollywood strikes by writers and actors are caused primarily by the fear that they can be replaced or duplicated by this AI. Perhaps the biggest fear is brought about by the exponential pace of technological change. For 100,000 years, mankind relied on the hard labor of hunter-gatherers. It was a civilization built on the foundations of agriculture and basic craftsmanship.

Two hundred years ago came the Industrial Revolution that transformed most manual labor to machines. This was the era when nearly simultaneous inventions of electricity, steam engines, printing press, automobiles and airplanes transformed even the daily lives of people. Then only a generation ago came the transition into the Digital Age with the coming of the internet, the smartphones, the computer chips used in almost every aspect of life and work.

Today, in less than a generation, we find that computers and manual labor are rapidly being replaced by these thinking machines.

AI is already close to replacing a number of human jobs. Here are three examples:

Uber, Google and car companies are doing research that will lead to the obsolescence of human drivers.

Every day hospitals all over the world fire off audio files to professional transcribers who understand the medical jargon doctors use. They transcribe the tapes and send these back to the hospital as texts. Much of these is done through call centers.  However, machine transcription is beginning to catch up and make this skill obsolete.

AI is already being used to answer financial questions which may take human analysts hours or even days to answer.

As machines become more intelligent than us, they could revolutionize the whole world. There is the risk that AI could further increase the inequalities we see in society today and destabilize the current world order. After all, the best AIs in the world today are in the hands of a very select group of private companies.

Douglas Heaven, a technology journalist, said in his book “Machines that Think:”I“if we get it right, AI will make us all healthier, wealthier and wiser. If we get it wrong, it could be one of the worst mistakes that we will ever make.”

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