What Is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence learning capabilities were recently covered in a TV show I watched about technological advancements which posed the question what the future might hold for us.
I’ve always found this area of artificial intelligence quite interesting way back from when I was just a kid playing electronic games, watching the Wargames movie and programming robotic toys. Once I started playing with computers and inevitably games, which brought with them some basic artificial intelligence which depending on the game could either be very easy or very hard to beat – the classic, timeless games are typically the ones which had a good balance which in turn equalled, good gameplay!
ASIMO is perhaps one of the most famous, advanced robots that have been developed in Japan that are currently out there – it was primarily known for being one of the first and best robots to actually walk on two legs like humans, even climb stairs.
However, in this particular TV show presented by James May (of Top Gear fame), he actually demonstrated what many scientists believe to be key to robotic and artificial intelligence learning – the capability to learn from experience just like a child does as it grows up. Just take a look at this little experiment he conducts with a modified ASIMO, now assuming that it’s all above board (which I assume it is), this makes for a very compelling point in science, how far can this progress?
The idea of artificial intelligence has certainly moved on a great deal from very basic electronic and computer games of the 70s and 80s to science fiction movies such as The Terminator and The Matrix, where machines will enslave and/or kill us all – do you think that this could be the start of that kind of future? Or perhaps we’ll just see nice friendly robots such as Johnny 5 from Short Circuit?
Do you appreciate the science of artificial intelligence that must have gone into this? Or do you think that this is just a bit of run-of-the-mill photo/video recognition software combined with some measuring kind of function being employed? At what point would deductive ‘programmed’ reasoning become artificial intelligence?
Comments: 1
3:50 pm 28th October, 2008
so how about this robot to participate in other planets exploration? what do you think? It seems can help for us to see the real score of the Universe with the help of this Artificial Intelligence.
Comments: 7
9:44 am 29th October, 2008
AI (to a greater and lesser degree) is all around us, in every from video games (as Simon mentions), to anti-lock breaking systems in cars, to vacuum cleaners, most often referred to as “fuzzy logic”!
Personally, I think we’re still decades away, simply because to emulate the brain of any animal — and even apparently simple creatures like honey bees have exceptionally sophisticated brains, capable of flight management, which our “big” brains aren’t capable of — we need to know everything about that brain works.
When it comes to the human brain, to even the leading nueroscientists, it’s still just a gelatinous puzzle box!
As we figure out the brain, those discoveries will lead to other, similar discoveries and breakthroughs in AI.
However, I think our understanding of genetics will far outstrip the pace of AI development, undermining the need for robots in hostile situations, which is for the most part, the most pressing need for robotics.
Essentially, we’ll re-engineer humans to be superhuman, negating the need for AI all together…