The Future of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is going to get some significant exposure with the advent of Steven Spielberg’s new movie "AI" being released this summer. It is about a 13 year old boy who in actuality is a superhuman computer. With this amount of exposure to the AI field it is useful to explain what AI is, where AI is today and what some of the dilemmas that face the future of AI.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be defined as the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. This domain has predominantly been a field characterized by complex research in laboratory scale environments and just only recently has been becoming a part of the landscape of technology in commercial applications.

There has been a lot of discussion concerning the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence and it’s future role in our small and getting smaller world. With the Internet and the PC becoming so commonplace people are now asking the question "What next?"

Well, Artificial Intelligence about to become a real force in our technological evolution. There has been so much development and change in the last 10 years that it is hard to believe how far we have come but there is going to be another technical revolution going on…and it will be about AI.

There are a lot of questions however about AI that over time will need to be addressed. Besides some of the challenging technical questions that are imposed on this field there are also some ethical and moral dilemmas that cannot be ignored. Some of the these questions include:

To what extent will intelligent machines be a part of our lives?

• Can machines be built to be self-aware?
• Are we even capable of modeling machines with such intelligence?
• If so, how would we control it?
• Who would really have the power?
• What makes us think that we could even consider building such a machine?
• What are the major technological hurdles?

The holy grail of AI is to create machines that can truly mimic the human brain in the way it thinks, responds and interacts. Whether or not this can truly happen is really unclear and a subject of intense debate. But one thing is becoming very clear: The hardware is starting to catch up to us.

If you take all of today’s computers and sum them together you will end up with the equivalent intellectual power of 1x10^17x flops/sec, which is what one human brain is capable of processing. Sounds like us humans are in good shape from the perspective, right? Wrong. With computer power increasing exponentially and doubling every 18 months or so computers are catching up quickly. At the current rate, it will be approximately 2021 when computers will have the equivalent processing power of all humans on this planet combined!!

With all that processing power should we make plans for machines to replace humans as the most powerful creature roaming the earth? Well, certainly not in our lifetime and perhaps never. There are numerous reasons for this. The biggest argument against developing true machine intelligence is the argument of evolution. Machines have not undergone the rigors of survival for millions of years the way humans have. The way we interact, think, respond and adapt are all developmental phases that are critical our intellectual dominance. This process hundreds of millions of years to evolve and the failures along the way are critical to our ultimate intellectual capacity and will be a major hurdle in our efforts to develop a truly artificially intelligent machine.