Imagine a future where you arrive home, your face and your voice are recognised, your lighting and heating are automatically set to suit your preferences and your biorhythms that particular day. Dinner is cooking, just to your liking, and the perfect choice of wine is chilling to its optimum temperature to suit your palette, the dinner and the day’s weather. Imagine this is achieved through Artificial Intelligence (AI). Robots aren’t just programmed and taught, they are able to discover and learn of their own accord. These are robots that think like humans.
Computer intelligence will take us there.
Of course much of this is already happening: brilliant apps that help the blind “see”, chess playing computers that can beat the world’s best homo-sapiens, a toothbrush that records your brushing habits and even logs which zones you might be under-brushing. Well I like clean teeth.
You may already use Amazon’s Alexa to set your lighting, unlock your car or update you on the news you’re interested in. Perhaps you chat to Siri on a daily basis, or you might be looking to upgrade to the newer Viv on the forthcoming Samsung Galaxy S8.
Should we just sit back, relax and look forward to an easier life?
In an episode of “The Good Wife”, an automated car is involved in an accident, crippling another driver. Was the driver of the intelligent car at fault? Or the car manufacturer?
How about training a robot with the input of many years of conversations to interact with us through “normal” conversation. Surely the bots will start interacting with each other in human-like ways...and yes, this has been trialled and concluded that in true humanistic mimicking, certain “personalities” will inevitably clash and overwrite each other’s opinions, potentially for years on end. A droid is programmed for a task and will work at it tirelessly and consistently. At least most real humans would back down at some point of exhaustion!
Right now, EU politicians are looking into protecting the “human rights” that should be transferred to robots, in anticipation that AI becomes so powerful that these bots truly think for themselves.
We already have situations where a computer’s decisions are taken verbatim without sufficient questioning from the human brain. Would you really follow your sat nav’s instructions which are telling you to drive across a field or straight into the sea…some people would…and have done!
Computer generated intelligence always needs to be overlayered with common sense! Will artificial intelligence always have to be complemented by “real” intelligence?