Artificial Intelligence: Building Smarter Machines
The term artificial intelligence The term refers to robots computers and other machines with a humanlike ability to reason and solve problems and solve problems CHAPTER 1 DAWN OF A NEW AGE The popular television program Jeopardy had never generated so much excitement The date was February 11 2011 Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter the two top winners in the game show’s twenty-seven year history had returned to vie for a 1 million prize But the real star of the show the reason for all the anticipation was the third contestant Watson was a smart machine an artificial intelligence AI developed over four years by twenty-five computer engineers at the technology corporation IBM The engineers had designed Watson specifically to challenge Jeopardy champions 4 Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence machinery with the ability to reason and solve problems was nothing new For decades scientists had been trying with limited success to instill basic human skills such as understanding language and recognizing objects into machines Jeopardy posed especially formidable challenges A game show with a twist Jeopardy reverses the normal question and-answer format Instead of asking questions show host Alex Trebek gives answers called clues and contestants provide the questions For example if Trebek says the author of Harry Potter the contestant who hits a buzzer first replies Who is J K Rowling Watson had to comprehend the full meaning of each clue to succeed at Jeopardy Was the phrasing straightforward or tricky Did it involve word play or humor Watson would require a huge knowledge base to cover the broad range of categories everything from sports to science to popular culture that show up on Jeopardy To prepare for the show computer scientists downloaded vast amounts of information from the Internet to give Watson the huge number of facts that it needed Just like any other contestant Watson has been studying up said a member of the Watson team before the contest Ken Jennings left and Brad Rutter right compete with Watson center an artificial intelligence created by IBM during a practice round on the TV quiz show Jeopardy In the final contest Watson beat out the two humans to win a 1 million prize Dawn of a New Age 5
As the cameras rolled for the Jeopardy broadcast Watson seemed to stand right there between its competitors But its television presence a logo on a computer screen was just for show The real Watson comprising ten racks of computer servers was located off-site Instead of listening to the statements read by Trebek Watson received its clues as digital text that it analyzed at lightning speed Its performance wasn’t perfect but it quickly established a lead over its human opponents By the end of the third day it had won the 1 million purse Ken Jennings famous for his seventy-four-game winning streak on the show took his defeat in stride I for one welcome our new computer overlords he said For those who fear that machines really could come to dominate humans Jennings’s statement hit close to home Watson’s victory raises difficult questions Did Watson really think Did it understand its participation in a quiz show Can machines acquire self-awareness If so is this a promising or a dangerous situation for humans Scientists and technologists have come down on both sides of the debate Some such as computer scientist Raymond Kurzweil director of engineering at Google predict that artificial intelligence will improve life for all humanity and may even extend the human life span indefinitely Others such as British physicist Stephen Hawking fear that the age of supersmart machines could threaten our very existence on Earth Although no machine not even Watson comes close to matching human intelligence many scientists believe it is only a matter of time before technology reaches this milestone STRONG AND WEAK Experts on artificial intelligence divide the machines into several types An artificial general intelligence AGI also called a strong artificial intelligence would be a true thinking machine able to learn on its own and modify its own programming without human input In theory an AGI would be able to solve any problem that a human could decipher 6 Artificial Intelligence
DEEP BLUE Jeopardy was not the fi rst game in which humans faced a machine challenger In the late twentieth century various organizations staged chess competitions pitting human players against computers with the humans always coming out on top A much publicized six-game match between IBM’s Deep Blue computer and Russian world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1996 also ended with a human victory After Deep Blue’s defeat IBM scientists began improving the computer for a rematch the next year Although the updated computer could review two hundred million possible chess moves each second and choose the ones most likely to lead to victory Kasparov won the fi rst game Deep Blue took the second game but games 3 4 and 5 ended in draws Tension mounted as the fi nal game began on May 11 1997 When Deep Blue won the game thereby winning the match two games to one the entire world took note For many the victory highlighted in a surprising and vivid way the growing power of computers It would not be narrowly tailored to perform a specific task such as analyzing the stock market or conducting computer searches Instead it would be able to deal with a broad range of issues Over time as it accumulated knowledge an AGI would get smarter and smarter What worries many experts and excites others is the possibility that an AGI might keep improving until it morphed into a super intelligence Such an entity would far surpass human intellectual abilities But it might not share human social and ethical values such as notions of fairness justice and right and wrong Without exceptionally careful programming and built-in safeguards a supersmart machine could become uncontrollable An example would be an intelligent robot weapon capable of selecting and firing on targets in wartime without Dawn of a New Age 7
