After my recent blog post someone who is rightfully concerned about the term "Artificial Intelligence", and how it is colloquially used, commented on Facebook. This made me realise that I should look into the term more, and maybe dive a bit deeper into the meanings of words, their definitions, common use and perception over time. While this commenter suggested "Assisted Intelligence" as a better replacement, I think there are likely many more (most not very good) terms that should and could be explored on this blog. I did some searching and came across this (you should definitely read the full article):
“If you observe a newborn baby you will see that it is always in constant motion while awake. From the first day the baby tries to understand its environment. The movements of the limbs is really a baby questioning his world: how does this feel? It tries to move itself towards the feel good state. ”
I have always been interested in the subject of Artificial Intelligence. It is because by building AI we are learning valuable lessons about ourselves. After all, we consider us to be intelligent, but are not really sure what that means. AI is an attempt to reverse engineer our mind and to define intelligence by creating an abstracted version of it. Can AI become smarter than us? What is the true nature of intelligence? These are the questions that truly make me wonder.
Very recently there have been some astonishing AI advancements with models based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Apparently today AI can perform image identification better than humans and win against the world champion of board game GO. We have lost tic-tac-toe, checkers and chess to a digital mind long time ago. These board games are closed environment discreet systems that have winning conditions and rules strictly defined. Older AIs used mostly brute-force and sheer computing power to win against humans. DNNs however are solving problems using evolved pattern recognition. This way they can tackle more fuzzy and human-like problems that have vast solution search space.
The holy grail of the field of AI is to develop the so-called seed intelligence or general purpose intelligence. A program that would exhibit such properties would be able to modify itself and perform general purpose tasks that have been given to it. In its versatility and adaptation it would be similar to human intelligence. Since such intelligence would be digital it might be many times more efficient than our meaty brains and could quickly modify itself to become much more advanced than homo sapiens.
Read The Full Article