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The Future of Artificial Intelligence

There are many possible advancements in the field Artificial Intelligence to look forward to in the coming years. Developments in A.I. personal assistants have sparked a large interest in A.I. development that should continue in the coming years. Scientists are currently working on revising the old Turing Test that has existed in the same format since the 1950s. Several companies within Silicon Valley have begun production on personal assistants like Siri, but for specific fields such as Banking. Apple even continues to push Siri forward , hoping to automate people's daily needs in the near future. Artificial Intelligence is still far from true self-aware intelligence but A.I. has become very central to technology's competitive landscape.

Personal Assistant A.I. : Siri, Cortana, and More

Siri, the intelligent personal assistant or knowledge navigator, was first released by Apple on the IPhone 4S on October, 14, 2011. This released led to a large increase in development of computerized assistants within the OS and mobile phone industries, with Apple's major competitor, Windows, releasing Cortana on April 2nd 2014. Despite these new advancements within the field, creation of A.I. personal assistant's really started with the natural language processing programs developed in the 1970s, most famously Eliza.

Eliza was one of many programs created during the 1970s as attempts to pass the Turing Test. Eliza was a program that simulated the speech of a Rogerian psychotherapist. It attempts to leading questions to continue and carry on conversations without saying anything particularly meaningful. Like Siri and Cortana there is no true intelligence within Eliza , it mainly just scans for keywords within sentences posed by the user and then responds according to that prompt. Eliza was the first of many chatterbots, a computer program designed to carry on conversation with a person through visuals or text based means. In a way all personal assistant A.I. to this day have been created based on this model.

Siri as stated previously, is a A.I. assistant developed by Apple for their iOS operating system. it uses natural language processing (like Eliza) to answer questions and make recommendations to the user through internet access. Siri is one of the main advertising points for Apple's major line of phones, the iPhone, and often overshadows the phone itself. Apple describes Siri as a "do engine" something that allows the user to speak to the internet directly. It was designed to be an active participant in the users everyday life, not something that is passive like a computer or the phone itself. Siri was meant to  be "a kinder, gentler version of HAL" and is often considered the poster child of Personal Assistant A.I. in the modern era.

In 2014 Microsoft created their own A.I. (Cortana) for their Windows operating systems in order to compete with Apple. Cortana takes her namesake from an Artificial Intelligence from the popular sci-fi video game series Halo. Similar to Siri, Cortana utilizes natural language processing to analyze keywords and sentence structure in order to answer the user's questions.

Artificial Intelligence in Art

Since Isaac Asimov's I, Robot in 1950, Artificial Intelligence has been at the forefront of art and media. Artificial Intelligence is one of the major topics within the science fiction genre and is extremely influential within the genre. In 1968 both the book 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur Clarke and the movie of the same name by Stanley Kubrick were released. The main villain, in both the book and movie ,  was HAL 9000 an AI computer. HAL 9000 valued the success of his mission over the lives of the crew.

In 1978 a popular TV show named Battlestar Galactica was released. This show featured warrior robots that fought for the extinction of the human race. The original show is personally one of my favorites. In 1984, The Terminator (as pictured above), was released. This extremely influential blockbuster, depicts Earth in the future having being taken over by murderous robots that are controlled by the artificial intelligence SkyNet. In Terminator Skynet was attempting to eradicate humanity for fear of them attempting to shut it down, thus preventing it from protecting the world. Skynet is an important figure of artificial intelligence in media and is considered one of the preeminent villains in both the science fiction genre and film as a whole.

One of the main characters of the popular sci-fi show , Star Trek: The Next Generation, is a self-aware android named Data. In 2001, Steven Spielberg released AI: Artificial Intelligence, a movie based of Stanley Kubrick's idea of a robot boy. In 2005 Ray Kurzweil released a book called Singularity. Singularity is the event in which the knowledge of artificial intelligence passes that of the human brain. At this point A.I. would be capable of self-recursive improvement, able to constantly improve and redesign itself, becoming capable of creating stronger and stronger artificial intelligence. At this point, events and occurrences within the world are predicted to become unfathomable to the human mind.

Artificial Intelligence is an essential subgenre of Science fiction that constantly reinvents and pushes forward the genre in various forms of art and media.

The Three Laws of Robotics

In 1942 writer and biochemist, Isaac Asimov, proposed the Three Laws of Robotics, which became the foundation of his famous book of short stories on Artificial Intelligence, I, Robot. The three laws of Robotics first appeared in Asimov's short story the "Runaround" in 1942. These three laws are extremely influential within science fiction and are often mentioned in many different forms of media.

1) A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2) A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law
3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

These laws , as shown above,  were meant to protect humans from robots, protect robots from themselves, and also prevent humans from using robots as means of violence towards other humans. Asimov believed that in an ideal world humans would also follow these same laws when dealing with robots.

Across science fiction there have been 2 major loopholes found in regards to the three laws.
1)Unknowing breach of the laws
- One major weakness of each of the laws is the idea that the Robot may have broken the law without knowing it.
2)Ambiguities resulting from lack of definition
- One ambiguity is the definition of a human being, what actually constitutes something as being human?
-Another ambiguity is the definition of a robot. What exactly constitutes a robot and how does a robot know that it is a robot?

The Turing Test

The Turing Test is a test created by British scientist , Alan Turing, "that tests whether a machine can exhibit intelligent behavior that is indistinguishable from that of a human". According to Dictionary.com, "a proposed test of a computer's ability to think, requiring that the covert substitution of the computer for one of the participants in  a keyboard and screen dialogue should be undetectable by the remaining human participant". In the modern day an A.I. capable of passing a Turing Test, would be capable of doing something like carrying on Facebook conversations with a person without them knowing they were talking to a machine.

Originally the turing test had nothing to do with artificial intelligence. When It was originally proposed in the paper, "The Imitation Game" it was meant to see if a woman could convince a third party judge (in a separate location) that she was in fact a man. The test worked very similar to how it works today (pictured above) but with a woman in place of the computer. The idea of the Turing Test is that if a group of judges is as likely to pick the human participant as they are the computer it proves that the computer is an accurate simulation of human.

Over the course of the 1970s many natural language processing (NLP) programs were created in an attempt to pass the Turing Test. One of the most famous, ELIZA, which we will discuss in more depth later, simulates a Rogerian psychotherapist. Many of these NLP programs simply scanned sentences for keywords and responded with questions accordingly never really creating a unique statement or response. Even in the modern day programs like Siri and Cortana utilize similar scans.

Present day the validity and applicability of the Turing Test has been in question, with many scientists proposing revisions or a completely new version of the test. Nonetheless the Turing Test is still extremely influential in the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence.

A Brief History of Modern Artificial Intelligence

The term Artificial Intelligence was first coined at a conference at Dartmouth College in 1956. The main premise behind this conference was the idea that "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it". This idea meant that intelligence and data could be quantified  and be made into something that can utilize all of the information. It was around this time that the first A.I. program Logic Theorist was first created by Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, and Cliff Shaw. This moment is widely considered the birth of artificial intelligence.

The subsequent years were considered the golden years of advancements in A.I. From 1956-1974 programs were created that were able to solve complex math problems in algebra and geometry, while other programs were capable of learning languages. Many scientists at this time believed that the rapid growth within the field would continue and that they would inevitably be able to create a fully intelligent and self aware machine soon. However this proved to not be the case, 1974-1980 are considered the first major lull in A.I. research, dubbed "the Winter of AI".

During the Winter of AI the expectations scientists had set forth for themselves during the golden years proved to be too much. The optimism of that period quickly turned into disappointment, and the field suffered heavily from lack of interest and lack of funding. There proved to be too much logistical and technological problems that couldn't be solved at the time.

Artificial Intelligence did not return to the forefront of scientific research again until 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer defeated chess champion, Garry Kasparov. In 2011 Apple released an intelligent personal assistant program or "knowledge navigator" program known as Siri. Later in 2014 Microsoft released their own version known as Cortana. As of now it is the status quo for all major smart phones to have some sort or AI assistant. In 2014 the chatbot, Eugene Goostman passed the Turing Test sparking debate of whether the Turing test, a test to see if a machine can exhibit intelligence that is indistinguishable from that of a human,n is truly a good measure of artificial intelligence.