In a BBC news article published yesterday, BBC's Kamal Ahmed interviewed Demis Hassabis, the head of DeepMind, Google's $800 million machine learning business and one of the world's leading authorities on the subject. In the interview, Mr. Hassabis, also Deep Mind's co-founder, has now called for a responsible debate about the role of ethics in the development of artificial intelligence.
"I think artificial intelligence is like any powerful new technology," Mr Hassabis said, "It has to be used responsibly. If it's used irresponsibly it could do harm".
Mr Hassabis was responding to concerns about the development of artificial intelligence raised, among others, by Elon Musk, the technology entrepreneur and a DeepMind investor, and Professor Stephen Hawking.
In other news covered by BBC on 15th September 2015, they point out that by 2050 some experts believe that machines will have reached human level intelligence. Thanks, in part, to a new era of machine learning, computer are already starting to assimilate information from raw data in the same way as the human infant learns from the world around her. It means we are getting machines that can, for example, teach themselves how to play computer games and get incredibly good at them (work ongoing at Google's DeepMind) and devices that can start to communicate in human-like speech, such as voice assistants on smartphones. Computers are beginning to understand the world outside of bits and bytes.
"I think artificial intelligence is like any powerful new technology," Mr Hassabis said, "It has to be used responsibly. If it's used irresponsibly it could do harm".
Mr Hassabis was responding to concerns about the development of artificial intelligence raised, among others, by Elon Musk, the technology entrepreneur and a DeepMind investor, and Professor Stephen Hawking.
In other news covered by BBC on 15th September 2015, they point out that by 2050 some experts believe that machines will have reached human level intelligence. Thanks, in part, to a new era of machine learning, computer are already starting to assimilate information from raw data in the same way as the human infant learns from the world around her. It means we are getting machines that can, for example, teach themselves how to play computer games and get incredibly good at them (work ongoing at Google's DeepMind) and devices that can start to communicate in human-like speech, such as voice assistants on smartphones. Computers are beginning to understand the world outside of bits and bytes.
The article summarizes a timeline of Artificial Intelligence as listed below.
AI Timeline
- 1951 - The first neural net machine SNARC was built and in the same year, Christopher Strachey wrote a checkers programme and Dietrich Prinz wrote one for chess.
- 1957 - The General Problem Solver was invented by Allen Newell and Herbert Simon.
- 1958 - AI pioneer John McCarthy came up with LISP, a programming language that allowed computers to operate on themselves.
- 1960 - Research labs built at MIT with a $2.2m grant from the Advanced Reserch Projects Agency - later known as Darpa
- 1960 - Stanford AI project founded by John McCarthy.
- 1964 - Joseph Weizenbaum created the first chatbot Eliza, which could fool humans but repeated back what was said to her.
- 1968 - Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick immortalised Hal, that classic vision of a machine that would match or exceed human intelligence by 2001.
- 1973 - A report on AI research in the UK formed the basis for the British government to discontinue support for AI in all but two universities.
- 1979 - The Stanford Cart became the first computer-controlled autonomous vehicle when it circumnavigated the Stanford AI lab.
- 1981 - Danny Hillis designed a machine that utilised parallel computing to bring new power to AI.
- 1980s - Backpropogation algorithm allowed neural networks to start being able to learn from their mistakes.
- 1985 - Aaron, an autonomous painting robot, was shown off.
- 1997 - DeepBlue, IBM's chess machine, beat then world champion Garry Kasparov.
- 1999 - Sony launched the AIBO, one of the first artificially intelligent pet robots.
- 2002 - The Roomba, an autonomous vacuum cleaner, was introduced.
- 2011 - IBM's Watson defeated champions from TV game show Jeopardy.
- 2011 - Smartphones introduced natural language voice assistants - Siri, Google Now and Cortana.
- 2014 - Stanford and Google revealed computers that could interpret images.
Have been keeping my ears open surrounding the AI concept/issue, and based on what I've read things are not too far off of sci-fi, but not quite at the threshold of exponential growth. I personally worry about what route the learning would take, since we already know that we can't control how organic intelligence will always make that journey, and we have nothing to support evidence of the journey an inorganic intelligence would take.
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