How Artificial Intelligence is Becoming a Reality
By Cubaser, 23rd Jun 2012 | Follow this author
| RSS Feed | Short URL http://nut.bz/3-j365_p/
Posted in WikinutNewsTechnology
Today we celebrate the birthday of Alan Turing, a man who made great advances in science and artificial intelligence. How far have we come since his birth on June 23, 1912?
Happy Birthday, Alan Turing
Today, Google and the rest of the world celebrates the birthday of Alan Turing, a famous British mathematician and computer scientist. He is also called the father of modern computer sciences and the idea of artificial intelligence, a notion that one day, computers will be able to think and sense just as humans do.
Alan Turing is famous for the creation of the Turing machine, a complex idea of a device that will write or read infinite amounts of characters on an infinitely long strip of tape. This complicated idea and others relating to computers led to his idea of the Turing Test - a test to decide at what point computers and humans become indistinguishable.
Artificial Intelligence?
The Turing test is easy to describe; test subject A, a human, begins to have a conversation with test subject B through an online chat client. Test subject A does not know if B is a computer or a human, but in reality, B is a computer. If test subject A can tell that B is a computer, then B does not pass the Turing test - however, if B's conversation is indistinguishable from a real human's conversation, then B has passed the Turing test.
This raises several questions - at what point does a computer begin to think? Some people think that we have already reached that point. Others think that that point may occur far, far into the future; how are we to be sure, however, if we cannot even tell the difference between a human speaking and a computer?
The Geminoid
Advances in artificial intelligence and technology has been rapidly expanding in the past few decades. Recently, a robot called Geminoid DK was created by a team of scientists and researchers who have been studying life-like artificial intelligence for years. In 2005, they had created their first robot - a robot that looks, speaks, and feels just like a real human. And since then, they had created two more, the latest one being Geminoid DK, the most realistic one in the set.
The Geminoid robots are designed to look just like their masters and speak like them, too. Suddenly, the world of artificial intelligence does not seem so far in the future after all.
What does this mean?
There are many implications for technology of such high caliber. Some think that eventually, computers and other technologies will develop sentience - that is, the ability to realize what it is, and gain the ability to think. Others say that this is a preposterous notion, but it may not be so preposterous when you see the amounts of technology that are surrounding us now.
As for right now, artificial intelligence is still in the making, and this may not be a bad thing - hundreds of years in the future, it's just as likely that we will have robot companions as it is that we will have robot coworkers!
Comments
1st Jul 2012 (#)
As long as they don't start to lord over us, take over our lives, subjugate us, it is welcome! I am reminded of Stephen Hawking cautioning us while looking out aggressively for aliens. We can invite the wrong attention! siva
Reply to this comment