Sunday, November 30, 2008

Machine Intelligence and its Implications

Last week, Aida and Hakson talked about Artificial Intelligence, a relatively new field in Computer Science and its implications. AI as a field has suffered some setbacks, but a lot of developments are taking place that would help us solve some of the toughest computer science problems. The article spoke about the “law of accelerating returns” or more a belief where technological change has an exponential progression and so AI research that is still in its inchoate stage would be accelerated in the near future.
In class, we discussed combining human and machine intelligence so that it would improve the quality of human life and make us more efficient at what we do. There were some pros and cons to this that were discussed. On one hand, machines would take all the mundane tasks off our hands and let us concentrate more on the problem at hand. However, then we face the problem of becoming way too dependent on machines to the extent that we forget or not be able to do even the simplest tasks on our own. There is also the scenario in which machines take our place and we lose our jobs.
Hence the questions “How can we engineer machine intelligence to be a benefit?”, “Is the current technological revolution similar to the industrial revolution in the 19th century and if so how much change would it bring? “To what extent should we be dependent on machines and robots before they take over?” As computer scientists, we have a technological imperative to solve certain problems. Fields like medicine and healthcare, biology, computing and problem solving have plenty of problems that AI can solve. We should fully invest in trying to combine human and machine intelligence. Humans have special skills like being able to recognize people and machines can perform complex computations quickly. Together, AI can have a significant impact on our lives.

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