10. Most AI is “Female”

One thing

that you may have noticed when it comes to AI that you possibly interact with, like Google Now, Siri, and Cortana, that the

default voice is female. For the record, this isn’t one of the terrifying facts; we just

find it fascinating that AI tends to be female. Why is that, exactly?

Well, there’s no specific reason but a few factors play into it. For example, studies

have shown that males and females both like the sound of female voices a bit better. Another

reason, according to Karl Fredric MacDorman, a computer scientist and expert in human-computer

interaction at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, is that mostly men work on AI

so they probably find females attractive and want their AI to follow suit. Kathleen Richardson,

a social anthropologist, said that female AI would be less threatening than male AI.

For example, compare Samantha in Her to the Terminator machines. Well, except for Terminator

3, but then again, who the hell actually remembers that movie?

9. Artificial Intelligence Pets

Pets are great, but they have a number of downsides. You have to clean up after them,

they can be destructive, they need to be fed, and of course, they die. Something that will

take care of all those downsides is AI driven pets. University of Melbourne animal welfare

researcher Dr. Jean-Loup Rault says that there are already a number of patents for robot

pets and they could be widely available by 2025.

Rault says that in the next 10-15 years, developers will work on a number of aspects of AI and

robotics so that manufacturers will be able to build pet-bots that people will be able

to make an emotional connection with. Rault believes that robotic pets will be one of

the only viable options for most people as the world gets more populated. He theorized

that by 2050, only the incredibly wealthy will be able to afford real live pets.

8. Artificial Intelligence Can Repair Itself

On the terrifying end of the spectrum, there was a paper published this year about a robot

that could rebuild itself, even after losing two of its six legs. The robot doesn’t know

what’s broken, but notices that its performance has dropped. Then, using an algorithm based

on trial and error, the robot can figure out what’s wrong and how to repair itself. The

researchers who developed the robot said that as it fixes itself, it updates its database

with all the things that will not work in a phase called “simulated childhood.”

This phase lasts for a few minutes and during that time, the robot processes 13,000 possible

movements. Those movements are pulled from 10^47 different behaviors, which is an unfathomable

number. For a comparison, that’s how many atoms make up the Earth. The implications

of this type of artificial intelligence are essentially limitless. Some of the more exciting

prospects include search and rescue and deep sea and space exploration.

7. Artificial Intelligence Can Write

The first piece for a major news organization that was written by AI appeared on the Los

Angeles Times website after a newspaper article reading:

“A shallow magnitude 4.7 earthquake was reported Monday morning five miles [8km] from

Westwood, California, according to the US Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at

6.25am Pacific time at a depth of 5.0 miles. According to the USGS, the epicenter was six

miles from Beverly Hills, California, seven miles from Universal City, California, seven

miles from Santa Monica, California, and 348 miles from Sacramento, California. In the

past 10 days, there have been no earthquakes magnitude 3.0 and greater centered nearby.

This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was created

by an algorithm written by the author.”

The computer was able to write the article based on data that was pulled from seismographs,

which turned them into figures and then plugged those figures into a story. The technology

was developed in part by Larry Birnbaum, a professor of journalism and the head of the

Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University. He was one of the developers of

the Quill system, which is an app for companies that do minimal writing. It takes statistics

and graphs and compiles them into written reports. As for creative writing, like novels

and screenplays, that is the next step for AI, but it’s obviously complicated. Perhaps

AI will start off at a Nicholas Sparks’ level and then work itself up from there.

6. Artificial Intelligence can be a Fierce Poker Player

A big step in the evolution of AI was when IBM’s chess-playing Deep Blue computer beat

reigning world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Another milestone was in 2011 when IBM’s

Watson appeared on Jeopardy and completely destroyed some of the best Jeopardy contestants

ever. AI took another major step in May 2015, when a supercomputer called Claudico from

Carnegie Mellon University competed in a game of Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold ’em poker

at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh. The tournament lasted two weeks and 80,000 hands were played.

In the end, Claudico came in fourth, and the “loss” was close enough to be considered

scientifically valid, meaning that statistically, Claudico tied his human competitors. While

it didn’t win, it was a big step in AI computing. The big difference between a game like poker

and playing chess or Jeopardy is that poker has a lot of missing information, and bluffing

is a major strategy and not a logical way of thinking.

Researchers said that the tournament was a great start and they believe that by 2020,

AI will be able to beat the best poker players in the world. This type of AI also has a number

of other applications instead of just trying to clean out casinos. The algorithms used

in Claudico will be applicable anywhere there is incomplete information, including cyber

security, medicine and negotiations.

5. Romantic Relationships with Artificial Intelligence

HER

A question that’s bound to arise is that if AI is almost or completely indistinguishable

from humans, will humans be able to have physical and emotional relationships with AI entities?

David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands had an interesting, but

plausible, scenario where sex with a robot could become more mainstream. He said that

at first it will come across as geeky, but then a story will appear in a publication

like Cosmo in which someone will rave about how great sex with a robot is, and the mainstream

attention could alter the prevailing attitudes.

But how close are we to something like that? Well, both Levy and Henrik Christensen, founder

of the European Robotics Research Network, thought that by 2012, humans would be having

sex with robots. We’re actually closer than you think, as there are currently a number

of sex toys that use robotics and promise pleasure like you’ve never experienced before.

As for serious relationships, like marriage, AI and Androids still need quite a few years

of advancement. With that being said, Levy believes that by 2050, human and robot marriages

will be made legal. Of course it could just be that Levy is way too big a fan of the movie

Her.

4. Artificial Intelligence Can Learn

There’s a saying about computers that they’re only as smart as the person using them. However,

with advancements with AI, computers are starting to learn by themselves. For example, Google

developed an AI system that taught itself to play Atari 2600 games. After doing so,

it beat some of the world’s best players.

Another learning AI system is an android developed by the United States Army that learned how

to cook from watching YouTube videos. The robot was able to learn the skills from visual

recognition and trial and error. While it’s unlikely that the military will use robot

chefs, cooking uses a wide arrange of skills so it is an excellent demonstration of what

the robot is capable of.

3. AI Will Become Smarter Than Humans

With AI having the ability to learn, computers are getting to be pretty smart. As of 2013,

AI was about at the same intelligence level as a four-year-old and there have been lots

of advances since then. For example, in 2014 a supercomputer cracked a complicated math

problem called Erdos discrepancy problem, which was published in 1930. The amazing thing

is that humans can’t even double check the solution because the equation is too long.

The file is 13-gigabytes, and just for comparison, all of Wikipedia is about 10-gigbytes.

According to renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil, by 2029 AI will be at about the level of intelligent

adult humans. Beyond that, anything is pretty much possible, especially if AI can get exponentially

smarter. For example, Kurzweil believes it could lead to something called singularity,

which is where humans and machines will meld into one entity.

2. Nautilus

An interesting development in artificial intelligence is an SGI Altix supercomputer called Nautilus.

It appears that, to a certain degree, Nautlius can predict the future. For example, it was

able to predict where Osama bin Laden was hiding within 125 miles, and was also able

to predict the Arab Spring that started in December of 2010.

Nautilus gathered this information from over 100 million news articles from all over the

world dating back to 1945. The articles would be analyzed for two different criteria: the

mood of the article, and the location of the story. This information led to a web of 100

trillion relationships and the data was fed into Nautilus. From that information, the

computer was able to piece the information together and create graphs that charted mood.

For example, with the Arab Spring, sentiment in the area was low before the protests.

The author of the findings, Kalev Leetaru from the University of Illinois’ Institute

for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Science, is looking at making the information

work in real time. While Nautilus won’t exactly predict the future, it may give mood

forecasts similar to economic forecasts or weather reports.

1. The AI Apocalypse

There’s little doubt that AI has the potential to greatly improve our lives. AI will make

the roads safer, help in medicine, aide the disabled and the elderly, work customer service

and a number of countless other jobs. However, AI also poses an incredible threat, and this

isn’t the stuff of science fiction, either. Top scientists and technologists like Stephen

Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk believe that AI is a very real, and dangerous threat

to humankind.

It’s so dangerous that Max Tegmark, a physicist at MIT, compared it to the development of

nuclear weapons and says we may only be able to do it right the first time. In fact, there

has been a push to actually slow down advancement on AI and focus more on containment. Containment

is important because if we were to ever lose control of AI, we may never get it back. Then

it’s just a matter of time, since the AI could wipe out humanity because it could calculate

that humans are a virus-like being, or it could kill humans as a way of self-preservation.

Essentially, AI will either fix all of our problems or destroy us all. In other words,

The Terminator and The Matrix aren’t nearly as farfetched as we previously believed.