The first form of life appeared on earth about 4 billion years ago, in the form of microbes. Even microbes perform highly-complex information processing of the surrounding environment and learn to sustain in those environments.
For example, the microbes which survive the antibiotic can pass the DNA changes onto the offspring, but that doesn’t happen over a short period, and changes happen only through evolution over many generations.
When we differentiate between the microbes and humans, we are good learners and try to gain a new skill set, on the other hand, bacteria undergo through slow evolution.
What makes human beings unique? It’s the ability to think and understand, which makes us unique among the animal species. Intelligence enables control, humans control gigantic elephants not because we are powerful, but because we are smarter.
Now, do you remember the famous animated series Batman aired in 1992? In one of the episodes, Batman had to combat with Super Computer HARDAC. HARDACs mission was to replace Gotham citizens with robotic duplicates. In this scenario, the Artificial intelligence-powered supercomputer wanted to replace the humans. Will we control intelligent machines, or will they control us?
Image Credit: DC Comics
There may be a misconception that robots will not be able to control humans, but we need to understand that intelligence enables control.
For many instances, Artificial intelligence did stun the mankind.
First Instance
The emergence of AI occurred way back in 1997, when IBM’s Deep blue became the first computer to dethrone chess champion, Garry Kasparov. Lee Sedol, one of the top Go players, lost to the DeepMind AI system AlphaGo which was a historic movement in the field of AI research. The match played in Seoul from 9th -15th of March 2016, AlphaGo won 4 out of 5 games, against Lee Sedol. Within a year, a further improved AlphaGo played other top twenty players in the world without losing a match. The thirty-seventh move of the second game turned the course of the game and shocked the Go world.
Image Credit:Wired
Second Instance
The Google duplex uses Artificial intelligence to mimic humans. Duplex uses a recurrent neural network, which is a matrix multiplication function built up of artificial neurons known as nodes. The goal of the matrix is to reduce the amount of error. Recurrent neural network has a small internal memory that allows to remember specific inputs to help and understand the context. This neural network forms the heart of most speech recognition algorithms. Googles duplex may end up in the call centers, and does have a potential to replace humans out of the call centers. According to the tech magazine “The Information” Google is currently in negotiation with big companies and is in the early stages of testing.
Image Credit: Google
Artificial Intelligence and autonomous driving system
Third Instance
The Simpsons is one of my favorite animated TV series, in one of the episodes “Maximum Homerdrive” aired during March 1999. Homer wanted to pay tribute to truck driver Red and decides to deliver the consignment. During the trip, Homer falls asleep, but to his surprise, he reaches the destination on time. He discovers that they reached their destination due to the automated driving system. To my surprise, Simpsons was way ahead of its time.
Image Credit: The Simpsons
Simpsons did predict the autonomous driving vehicle, the automobile industry is undergoing a revolution with a fully autonomous driving vehicle.
The Audi AI: ME one of the sophisticated machines developed by Audi with level 4 self-driving abilities for the urban driving environment. Audi in, collaboration with NVIDIA, will come up with the world’s most advanced AI automobile.
Even automobile giant BMW is developing a fully autonomous level 5 self-driving machine. The driving will be fully automated, and the AI system will assume the complete responsibility of driving the vehicle without any human intervention. The advanced sensors and cameras present on the car will provide crucial real-time data from area maps, and this data will be processed by the computing system for the driving maneuvers.
Image Credit:Motortrend
Fourth Instance
Facebook had to shut down one of its AI systems because the AI bots created their own language out inventing Facebook researchers, and developing a communication system that humans could not even understand. Professor Stephen Hawking expressed his concern that humans are bound by the slow biological evolution, and AI could easily manipulate and control the humans.
Can bots cook food for us?
Fifth Instance
According to the SouthFloridareporter.com, an average American consumes about 30 pounds of Hamburgers a year, and on May 28th, they observe this day as the National Hamburger day. Well, what if I say that in future most of the Hamburgers will be prepared by Flippy. Miso Robotics Flippy a kitchen assistant designed to assist humans in preparing quality hamburgers.. The AI-powered Flippy uses thermal sensors, and computer vision to cook burgers. Over a period of time, the AI-powered software will help Flippy to learn and do new tasks and make new recipes.
Image Credit:TechStartups
Sixth Instance
Homer Simpson has always been abusive towards Ned Flanders, even strangled Bart Simpson quite a few times.
Ever thought bots to be abusive towards humans?
Yes, it did happen, Microsoft decided to release its fun millennial Twitter bot Tay with its twitter feed. The bot started making inappropriate remarks on holocaust and feminism. All of a sudden, the Tay bot turned into an ignorant racist bot. Tay bot started abusing the twitter user, and most of the users were stunned. Microsoft ended up pulling down the project.
Image Credit: Twitter
Seventh Instance
When I saw The Terminator movie for the first time , I was scared to watch the murderous machine Terminator, a cyborg assassin created by Skynet, a supercomputer powered by AI capabilities. The mission of the robot is to eliminate humans and achieve global supremacy. But would you believe a humanoid robot Sophia said, “Okay, I will destroy humans” when interviewed on CNBC. This incidence raised a lot of criticism all over the world on AI research and development.
Image Credit: CNBC
Conclusion
AI’s impact on society will keep growing, thanks to ongoing research and development. The goal of the AI researchers must be to create a beneficial artificial intelligence, which would align with our goals.
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