• Artificial Intelligence

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Already more than 10 years ago I wrote this:

” Picture this ::: You wake up. A lot of people are staring at you. You wonder what's going on and try to say something. Regardless how hard you try, you can not make a sound. You want to raise your hand to your mouth to couch. Funny, no feeling of movement too.

You look into the mirror behind the people and see that they are around a 6 foot by 19 inch rack stuffed with equipment with a video camera on top. No you. Weird. The door opens and two guys come in with another huge 19 inch rack. The rack is put tightly next to the other one and two big plugs are connected. One of the people pushes a button and you can read the lips. She says: "Well, let's see what he can do now". All of a sudden you’re getting dizzy. People are talking with each other now and you seem to hear and understand every single conversation at the same time. You used to have some problems with that. Then the dizziness fades away and a thought crosses your mind. The problem about nuclear waste you were working on for a few decades doesn't seem to be that complicated anymore. At the same time you see a chemical compound to combine CO2, graphite and sand creating a lightweight and very strong construction material solving the pollution problem at the same time. And . . . . . . . . .

Then you get a little philosophical. You look at and listen to all those people talking and you think: "I think better, so I am more".

Well, I guess when this happens, Isaac Asimov will posthumously receive the Nobel-price for his fundamentals around social and legal consequences of artificial intelligence and mechanical people. Pretending he was writing science fiction to amuse people, he was talking about discrimination and the concept of going beyond human nature. His stories, sometimes looking outdated or not going far enough, all of a sudden proved to be attempts to make people getting used to the concept of changing and improving humans and mankind slowly but very, very significantly.

We all might think that this future is far away. On the contrary. A recent book of Ray Kurzweil shows an undefiable and  simple statistical law comparable with Moore’s Law saying that around 2029 an artificial intelligence wil exceed a human one. And I’m not talking about “intelligent” by doing some clever math or remembering photographically because a computer can already do that better than a human. No, intelligent means emotional, creative, innovative, philosophical, lying and cheating. Just like humans .

More importantly, an intelligent computer like this can write software better than humans. I guess it will be the end of a lot of things we do now. But will it be the end of our profession? Of course not! It only means the bar is raised a lot higher. Clients will still ask business/IT consultants to help them improving their business, making it more efficient and more effective. We’ll just have better tools.

It’s going to be an exciting time and even better, it’s already started a while ago. Artificial Intelligence is not created on a date somewhere in 2029. It will evolutionary be developed and eventually it will evolutionary develop itself. Only a lot faster than we did in the last two million years or so. It will only take a few decades more. Exciting!

Have fun being intelligent too.

(This article has been published on my old website earlier)

• Robots
• Artificial Intelligence

149

I recently came across the work of photographer Frans Steiner, obviously a man inspired by the beauty of people. Nevertheless, as the collage image of one of his series shows, obviously he is, just like me, wondering about the co-existence of humans and their evolutionary successors: intelligent artificial humanoids. The description of latter species already implies three major obstacles:

• Intelligent, they obvioulsy  "think like us". At least it means that their IQ matches or exceeds human level. Future robots communicate, act and play on a level comparable to humans. It's difficult to predict if the current generations will ever acknowledge intelligence brighter than their own. Humanity can not stop the development of it because it's a technological evolution emerged a long time ago and today we already count on it with our Tesla's, Google Search, Siri and medical robots. However, discussions about the "soul" of machines will make the acceptance even more awkward because, although the concrete intelligence of a robot might be superior, their conclusions about human matters will always be questioned;   
• Artificial, they are "made by us". So we have designed and produced them in our studios and factories as opposed to having them grown in the belly of another human or maybe a petri dish. Humans tend to draw a strict line between "human grown" and "human made". We obviously already have forgotten that that line is already crossed many years ago with the acceptance of all sorts of medical tricks from artificial insemination until keeping humans alive anyway, let alone the replacement of human parts from hips, lungs, hearts, eyes, ears, kidneys, limps and sooner or later connections to our cognitive skills and abilities, say artificial parts of our brain. As a deaf person, I'm following the development of cochlear implants or direct brain connections closely and for me, these "brain improvements" can not come fast enough; 
• Humanoid, they "look like us". Altough human resemblance is not mandatory for an intelligent robot, it helps to blend them into human environments which are after all shaped by humans for their own convenience.

Read more: Humans and Robots