Artificial Intelligence began as a
philosophical conundrum in ancient times, developed into a science fiction
forecast (and warning) in the Modern Era and is a practical reality today. This
shows that from the earliest known period of human history to the present day
it has been a subject of interest to some of the brightest minds and powerful
personalities. Here’s a run-down of some of the most insightful, important or
accurate things which have been said:
Alan Turing was a pioneer in
bringing AI from the realm of philosophical prediction to reality. He realized
in the 1950s it would need greater understanding of human intelligence before
we could hope to build machines which would “think” like us.
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“I believe that at the end of the
century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much
that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be
contradicted.” (1950)
But he was also aware of the
dangers.
“It seems probable that once the
machine thinking method has started, it would not take long to outstrip our
feeble powers… They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their
wits. At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take
control.”
Shortly after, in 1956, computer
scientist John McCarthy instigated the Dartmouth Conference, an
organized event aimed at moving forward serious scientific development of AI.
His proposal summed up concepts that have formed the basis for academic study
of AI ever since.
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“The study is to proceed on the
basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of
intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be
made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use
language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved
for humans, and improve themselves.”
Jeff Hawkins, who founded Palm, also
studied neuroscience and came to understand that a fuller understanding of the
human brain needed to be achieved before AI would become useful.
“AI scientists tried to program
computers to act like humans without first understanding what intelligence is
and what it means to understand. They left out the most important part of
building intelligent machines, the intelligence … before we attempt to build
intelligent machines we have to first understand how the brain things, and
there is nothing artificial about that.”
Former US president Barrack Obama
understands the difference between specialized and generalized AI:
“We’ve been seeing specialized AI in
every aspect of our lives, from medicine and transportation to how electricity
is distributed, and it promises to create a vastly more productive and
efficient economy … But it also has some downsides that we’re gonna have to
figure out in terms of not eliminating jobs. It could increase inequality. It
could suppress wages.”
While Vladimir Putin – The Russian
president sees AI as a key to unlock power.
“Artificial intelligence is the
future, not only for Russian, but for all of humankind. It comes with colossal
opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes
the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”
Others such as physicist Stephen
Hawking have felt that warnings are what are needed most.
“The development of full artificial
intelligence could spell the end of the human race … it would take off on its
own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited
by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”
And he is not alone. Entrepreneur
and technologist Elon Musk, though a keen
investor in AI technology, believes:
“I think we should be very careful
about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest
existential threat is, I’d probably say that. So we need to be very careful.”
Others are more optimistic – such as
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg who has publicly disagreed with
Musk’s statements.
“Whenever I hear people saying AI is
going to hurt people in the future I think, yeah, technology can generally
always be used for good and bad and you need to be careful about how you build
it … if you’re arguing against AI then you’re arguing against safer cars that
aren’t going to have accidents, and you’re arguing against being able to better
diagnose people when they’re sick.”
His colleague at Facebook, Yan
Lecun, director of AI research, explains that unsupervised learning –
teaching machines to learn for themselves without having to be explicitly told
if everything they do is right or wrong – is the key to “true” AI.
“Most of human and animal learning
is unsupervised learning. If intelligence was a cake, unsupervised learning
would be the cake, supervised learning would be the icing on the cake, and
reinforcement learning would be the cherry on the cake. We know how to make the
icing and the cherry, but we don’t know how to make the cake. We need to solve
the unsupervised learning problem before we can even think of getting to true
AI.”
Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page knew that Google’s ultimate
goal would be AI even when most people thought of it as simply a search engine.“Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted and it would give you the right thing. We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we’re working on.” – Larry Page, 2000.
“If you had all of the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” – Sergey Brin, 2004.
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