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Kathleen Walch, entrepreneur, savvy marketer, AI and Machine Learning expert, and tech industry connector explains, People
have long dreamed of the idea of machines having the intelligence and
capabilities of humans.
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| Photo: Dawn.. Pixabay |
From the early Greek myths of Hephaestus and his
automatons to the Golem of Eastern European Jewish tradition to well
over a hundred years of science fiction stories, novels and movies, our
human imaginations have envisioned what it would be like to have
sentient, intelligent, human-like machines co-exist with us. In 1920
Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) first coined the
word “robot” and gave us a name to give to the creations of our
imaginations. In many ways, the quest for the intelligent machine lead
to the development of the modern computer. Ideas by Alan Turing not only
formulated the basis of programmable machines, but also the core of the
concepts of artificial intelligence, with the namesake Turing Test
providing a means for evaluating intelligent machines.
Yet, with centuries of technology advancement and the almost exponential increase of computing resources, data, knowledge, and capabilities, we still have not yet achieved the vision of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) -- machines that can be an equal counterpart of human ability. We’re not even close. We have devices we can talk to that don’t understand what we’re saying. We have cars that will happily drive straight into a wall if that’s what your GPS instructs it to do. Machines are detecting images but not understanding what they are. And we have amazing machines that can beat world champions at chess and Go and multiplayer games, but can’t answer a question as basic as “how long should I cook a 14 pound turkey?” We’ve mastered computing. We’ve wrangled big data. We’re figuring out learning. We have no idea how to achieve general intelligence.
Part of the reason for this disconnect is confusing the various things that we’ve developed as a result of our quest for the intelligent machine from the quest itself. Artificial intelligence is not a technology...
AI is Not A Technology
Is AI the technologies people use to make machines intelligent, or, is it the movement towards the goal of achieving machine intelligence? According to John McCarthy, AI is actually a science. It’s a field of study. But it might be more helpful to think of AI as a goal. If AI is considered to be a collection of technologies, then you can argue all day about what is and what isn’t AI. Are software robots AI? Are self-driving cars AI? Is computer vision AI? Is character recognition AI? If you think about it as technology then it’s always subject to disagreement and interpretation. However, if you think about it as a goal, or a quest, then it’s something we’re always striving to achieve, even if we aren’t quite there yet. Even if you think of AI as a field of study, like physics, those fields of study have goals.
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Source: Forbes
