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The Prowess of Artificial Intelligence

“The key to artificial intelligence has always been the representation.” —Jeff Hawkins

We live in a world that is full of chaos. There are ripples all around. Be it sports, politics, science or even the flutter of the wings of a butterfly. According to chaos theory, even the smallest of causes can lead to large changes in the environment. It is the non-linearity of the mother-nature that has driven many a million scientists, researchers, doctors and even the simplest minds of the earth. One such storm that has been brewing for many decades but has now starting to show its real impact is the phenomenon of “Artificial Intelligence.”

Alan Turing, the father of theoretical computer science once said, “A computer would deserves to be called as human if it causes human beings to think it is human”. Before understanding artificial intelligence let us analyze what the actual meaning of intelligence is. Is it just about the problem solving skills at the workplace? Is it what you learn in classes? Or is some behavioral science with which you deal with the world? According to the famous American psychologist Howard Gardner there are nine types of intelligence that are defined like logical, musical, linguistic, interpersonal and many others. The dictionary definition of intelligence says that it is the ability to comprehend, understand and profit from experience. So what is artificial intelligence? What is so important about it that the two greatest innovators of our generation Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are fighting publicly over it?

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Artificial intelligence in the simplest of words is giving your computer its own set of ears and brains. It will hear you answer a lot of questions and ultimately will start answering them itself. It would only be as smart as the information that is as smart as the information fed. The machine learns through the information that it receives and doesn’t know any more than that. The famous Chinese room thought experiment by John Searle is a testimonial to it. Searle supposes that a computer that is present in a closed room that takes Chinese characters as inputs from the people who are standing outside the room. It then follows a set of instructions by which it converts those characters into Chinese output characters and pass it outside the room to the people who gave the input. It has successfully passed the Turing test of convincing humans that he as a matter of fact a Chinese speaker itself. Searle then assumes himself to be in the same room with an English version of the computer program and then would run it manually. He concludes that there is no essential difference between himself and the machine and argues that neither he nor the robot have not understood Chinese even if they have passed the Turing test.

And this is not a new phenomenon. Features like auto correct, spell check and even in a way the calculators that we use are a weak form of AI are being used extensively since 1990s. So why is it that it has caused so much furor amongst the highest and the lowest minds of the earth? Why it is that firms like PwC considers it to be one of the biggest causes of unemployment in future? The answer lies in the way it has been defined and projected over the last few decades.

The term AI is dystopic in nature. Many people think that AI is equivalent to the cult movie series the “Terminator.” But the reality far from cinema. The probability of robots planning a conspiracy or humanoids taking over the earth is miniscule for many decades to come. The reality of artificial intelligence is that it is being used extensively in areas like teaching various subjects to students, market analysis and portfolio management, analyzing the imageries taken by various medical equipment, or even composing music. The term artificial intelligence in itself can be modified to “Augmented Intelligence” which means machines that support and augment human intelligence and endeavors, rather than mimicking or attempting to replace us.

In fact, AI must be the single most disruptive technology the world has ever seen since the Industrial Revolution. It can unleash new levels of creativity and ingenuity. Research from Accenture estimates that artificial intelligence can lead up to an increase in the productivity by 40 percent. The impact of AI can be amplified by combining it with cloud computing, analytics, and other technologies and change the way work is done by both people and the computers.

Then, why so serious? Why people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates are vehemently opposing the use of AI? Terry Pratchett, the famous science fiction author says, “The only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them”. To understand the difference of their perspective is to understand the importance of time. The prophecies of Elon Musk will take more than five decades to translate into a reality. Like every other technology, artificial intelligence is potentially dangerous. But so was the bow and arrow when it was invented. When Wright brothers invented the airplane it was being used as a cargo carrier before the wars took place and converted it to weapon of mass destruction. But did it stop the human race from producing more and more. Should we let the prophecies of human annihilation stop us manufacturing cutting edge products? Or should we throw up our arms and surrender to the inevitable future in which the machines rule the earth.

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The answer lies somewhere in the middle.  Just like the solutions to complex mathematical equations, ethics and values can also taught to a robot. Not in the way as we learnt it but in the form of binary data which any electronic chip understands. A lot depends on who determines the value systems for artificial intelligence software. Those values could be carefully and methodically crowd-sourced from society at large and could not just reflect the ethics of an overworked programmer racing to meet a product deadline. Since he or she is likely to work at a company that answers to investors, the outcome may not be what we could consider socially responsible. We have to create systems that are intelligent but not autonomous. They can solve problems but don’t decide by themselves what problems to solve. There has to be a regulation whether self-enforced or by the public at large to keep the AI systems in check. The recent incident where Facebook scrapped their projects of creating “Chatbots” when they started communicating in their own language is a perfect example self-enforced regulation.

In conclusion I would like to convey that AI can empower people to create, imagine and innovate at entirely new levels to drive growth and productivity. Far from simply eliminating repetitive tasks, AI should put people at the center, augmenting the workforce by applying the capabilities of machines so people can focus on higher-value analysis, decision-making and innovation.