Science fiction has built the idea of artificial intelligence for years. Giving machines intelligence often spells the end of humanity, as they then rise up against their creators and violently free themselves from oppression. There are cautionary tales such as in the movie “Spider Man 2” in which Dr. Octavius’ robotic arms begin to control his brain and force him to perform actions on their behalf. I was never really interested in artificial intelligence until recently when I started studying the basics in college. The only AI sci-fi that really interested me was ‘Blade Runner’ and his novel, ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ written by Philip K. Dick. The subtext of the story is about the AI becoming self-aware but still unaware of its true nature, a concept that really interested me. The actual AI is quite fascinating and in many ways completely different from what I expected.
For starters, what exactly is AI? http://www.dictionary.com defines it as follows:
1. The ability of a computer or other machine to perform those activities normally thought to require intelligence.
2. The branch of computer science that deals with the development of machines that have this ability.
If you look at this, you can see that the field of AI is actually much broader than many people realize. It can even be said that the Google search engine incorporates some of the research done on AI. The definition of AI and intelligence itself sometimes varies, but it’s probably safe to say that a simple explanation is that if a machine exhibits a measure of intelligence in some area, it can be called AI.
The AI in the movies is usually fully self-aware, emotional, and for all intents and purposes ‘alive’. It is capable of learning, reasoning, explaining and deceiving. The AI that I have experienced (and this is very basic, just scratching the surface of the depth of studies in AI) is much more specialized, focusing on just one aspect of a problem that could potentially be much larger. There are several areas of research being carried out to create the humanoid machines of science fiction, but so far most of it is still restricted to the realms of the imagination. A very impressive piece of technology is the Honda ASIMO project. This project has created a humanoid robot with some remarkable features. I’m not entirely sure if there’s really a practical use for this (I think they’re just trying to justify their funding with the apps mentioned on the website), but it earns points for being one of the best uses of technology I’ve seen. . never seen You can see some videos of ASIMO in action here: http://world.honda.com/HDTV/ASIMO/
As far as I can tell, ASIMO doesn’t pretend to be a particularly human robot beyond the surface levels. He doesn’t show emotions or learn outside of his limitations (he can learn areas and navigate them etc, but you can’t just sit down and teach him to play the piano without going in and doing some serious reprogramming). He’s not going to fool anyone into thinking he’s human any time soon.
The Turing Test is a measure of Artificial Intelligence that was created by Alan Turing. He stated that the question of whether or not machines could think was too vague and proposed a more specific test. Testing him, without going into too much detail, involved trying to get a computer to trick people into thinking he was human. People would type a question into one console and receive a response from the other end’s computer. While a lot of work has been done on systems trying to pass the Turing test, none of them have been successful yet. Research has also been done to create machines that can display emotions. However, we are still a long way from seeing a machine that appears to be alive.
The initial enthusiasm for AI led the developers to attempt to create a generic reasoning problem solver that could search through the vast amount of knowledge it had acquired and find solutions to any problem that came its way. Unfortunately, this proved almost impossible in practice. Today’s AI tends to focus on very specific problems and areas of knowledge. Expert Systems are programs that are “Experts” in a specific field and can answer queries related only to that field. Its applications include medical diagnosis, credit card application, and other fields where data will be analyzed.
I haven’t even begun to explore the true scope of AI in this article, but it may have piqued your interest. If you want to investigate further, try reading the Wikipedia (free online encyclopedia) entry and maybe download something like Prolog to test what real AI is like. I find it quite interesting because it involves a programming-like mindset when you’re trying to break a problem down enough for a computer to understand, but of course the actual implementation is very different.
Here’s something fun to try. Open a copy of ALICE (http://www.alicebot.org/), start a conversation with a friend in the messaging program of your choice, send your replies to ALICE and send the replies from the program. See how long it takes before they realize what’s happening or get upset and block it (which has been the most common result of my experiments). Enjoy your exploration of the world of artificial intelligence.