The World as I see it.

I mentioned here http://jideofo74.blog.com/1031546/ that I would expand on Artificial Intelligence.

The horror of which I refer to is that with time, AI will take over whether we like it or not. Let me explain my half fear and half fascination.

Personally, I will define Artificial Intelligence as the study of “Intelligent behaviour” in non living things. No need to philosophize here as to what constitutes living and non living things. We all can differentiate between a living and a non-living thing.  Intelligence is a characteristic common to living things - the ability not only to reason but to act on logical reasoning. For non-living things to display even the simplest signs of intelligence unassisted by humans is, in all honesty, staggering. Watching George - the online robot chatter box - yesterday responding to human conversation got my mind free flowing with possibilities. First, I recalled my first experience with Artificial Intelligence. It was many full moons ago when a cousin got a new birthday present. It was an automatic toy car. It was what you can call an “Intelligent Car”. It moved in straight lines and when it met an obstruction that left it with no room in front of it, it reversed and changed direction. It would continue in this new direction and in a straight line till it meets another obstruction and the same thing happens again. To me it was magic.  The big deal was the fact that it changed direction on its own. That is the intelligence - artificial intelligence in this case. There was no room in front so it changed direction. Similarly, George was responding to human conversation - on its own.  Its responses were not always coherent but shocking all the same. Shocking when one considers what improvement George can make in ten years time. Think about it. What we hear today is about call centres being out-sourced to countries like India. With a better “George” in place, can you see the picture? Going by George’s performance alone, being able to learn at the rate machines learn, who is to say that every telephone operator in the country will not be displaced, in a 10 - 20 years time?  Is that thought not scary especially when one thinks of the history of AI in the first place?

I will divide AI into two broad branches - Computers and Machines/Robots. Computers comprising all the stuff you do with your computer from applications to internet to video streaming to games and millions more. Every single thing you do with you computer is thanks to artificial intelligence. From the basic “Print” to “Search” to “Spell-check” to “Shut down” - they are all intelligent actions.  Robots/Machines on the other hand describe the machines and robots built to do special physical jobs.

We all know what we can do with computers these days especially the internet. Without getting too technical - fat chance! I am not a geek - we all have access to the greatest pool of information and connectivity in the history of mankind and it gets bigger by the second. We all do e-mails, voice calls, video-conferencing, job-hunting, bank statements, buying and selling, travel tickets, up-to-date news - text, pictures and video - as opposed to printed-on-paper news, video clips especially music, research - gone are the days of going to the library to seek information, blogging, video-blogging, photoblogging http://www.alakija.shutterchance.com/and online photo albums and photo sharing http://www.flickr.com/ and as we all know - porn. Before, the internet was, at least for me it was, a place where big businesses “opened shop”. It looked to me like a place where big businesses advertised their services. Wrong. The internet belongs to you just as much as it belongs to Bill Gates. That is the good as well as the bad thing about the internet - freedom, complete freedom. And the way it is rolling out - concepts are been born everyday as to how the internet can be made even more useful to us. Gone are the days when the big shots called the shots, kids are more powerful in determining the way internet technologies go than the big shots. Microsoft launching Xbox and Rupert Murdoch buying MySpace confirms this. Talking of Bill Gates, he believed - and he is right - that the internet is the next big thing. By reading his The Road Ahead [1999] and Business at the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy [2000] you get a better picture as to what he means by the internet. He calls it the information super-highway. Just think of what you could do with the internet in 1994 [when I started using it] and compare it with today - 2006. Unbelievable. The good news is it will continue to get bigger and better, the internet will be able to do more till, well till time stops ticking or we all get blown to smithereens by some dictator somewhere. Till then, the internet is open to all possibilities. That is one demonstration of the power of Artificial Intelligence.

When it comes to Robots and Machines, their impact has been less and somewhat underrated and for very understandable reasons. They are far more expensive to make than developing intelligent software. Many people not realising that the internet is all down to AI, do not think AI until they see a robot or some automatic machine, most especially a humanoid - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanoid.  The most advanced humanoid out there is the ASIMO - see http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1210345008392050115. This thing can stand, walk and run on its own. Considering its history, only god knows how much better it will be in 10 years time. In second place is Sony’s QRIO http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/QRIO/. As far as the experts are concerned, we are still in the infant stages of humanoids. Just like computers in the early days, they are very expensive and relatively bulky. With time imagine the roles they will be able to play in society. Equipped with the verbal abilities of George, in time they will move and talk. With zero distraction and zero fatigue, you can begin to imagine how much better they will be will be at many duties. Besides with their memory being able to expanded at will we will, their knowledge will be encyclopaedic and their efficiency 100%. Considering these robots exponential improvement with time - the average repetitive or highly specialist’s skilled workers days are well and truly numbered.

In my final analysis, Artificial Intelligence is real and is here to stay. AI alarmists are not out of place. It will be more revolutionary than all other known revolutions put together. Empires will perish, new empires will emerge. Human jobs will be lost in the millions but one very important point is worth mentioning here. Machines cannot feel. All AI is programmed. Whether machines can think or have a conscience is not worth worrying about - they will outdo any living conscience or ability to think out there. They crux of the issue here is absence of motivation. They are not selfish so we [humans] have nothing to worry about. They [machines] are nothing but “perfect slaves” that cost the owner/manufacturer nothing but the initial cost-price, cost of new programs, repair and spare parts.

For as long as records have been kept, men have wandered about the cosmos. What is out there? Where does it all come from? How did the universe come about? Such inquiries have served as roots for many of our dearest myths. The announcement last week of the discovery of a planet outside our solar system, and the attendant apathy which accompanied it, prompted this writer into investigating the question of why men should care about the heavens at all. Perhaps the primary reason for man’s curiosity about the cosmos is that, to use a trite phrase, it is the final frontier. For while there are few new lands on the surface of the earth left undiscovered, the vastness of space is sure to defy any attempts at comprehensive exploration. As far as mankind is concerned, space may as well be infinite, even if in fact it may not be so. The immense magnitude of interstellar dimensions is hard for the human mind to grasp. For example, we are used to thinking of our planet as vast, as is indeed true for most of our purposes. It would take a light photon, the fastest thing there is, just under a second and a half to circumnavigate the equator. It would take the same light ray eight minutes to cross the void separating the sun and the Earth, and 2.2 million years to reach us were it to start out from the Andromeda galaxy. Yet the Andromeda galaxy is not unduly distant as stellar objects go. The universe is not extreme only in the distances between its contents, however. To be told that our sun is so large that it would comfortably contain a million Earths is enough to give one pause. What reaction can there be to the fact that our sun is fairly average as stars go, with stars having been observed a thousand times larger? The temperature of our gentle giant is a mild 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface, rising to a hellish 27 million degrees Fahrenheit at the center. By way of contrast, it should be noted that iron boils at a mere 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit. And what of the other exotic phenomena which space presents us with? There are neutron stars, whose material is so dense that a teaspoon would weigh in the tons. There are supernovae, when stars explode, and in the process often radiate in a few days more energy than our sun would given a hundred million years. The possibility of the existence of black holes, objects whose gravitational attraction is so strong even light cannot escape their grasp, is taken very seriously by the scientific community. And yet, even taking into account the wonders of the visible cosmos, of which only a small few have been detailed above, the speculations of cosmologists carry one into the consideration of even more exotic objects and ideas. For instance, most of us have managed to reconcile ourselves to the idea of four dimensional space-time, even if we don’t really know what this means. Yet, if we are to believe some cosmological theories, space consists not of four, but 10 dimensions, with the other six “tucked away” so tightly that we cannot observe them. Still other speculations suggest the possibility that our universe is only one of an infinity of universes branching and budding off from each other. The universe is wonderful, this much we know. But what is heaven that man should be mindful of it? One reason is that the heavens hold the key to many of the questions which reflective individuals have wrestled with for millennia, the big questions of our origins, our present condition and our future. Current physical theories tell us that the universe has a finite, albeit a great, age. This naturally leads the curious to ask “What was there before our universe? Did time start with the cosmos? Why did the universe come into being at all? Will the universe come to an end?” To the last question at least, modern science seems to give an answer, namely, yes, in one way or another. Either the universe will eventually implode on itself, or the dissipation of energy will lead to the heat death of the cosmos. It thus seems that death does indeed come to us all. Another reason why man must mind the heavens has to do with his own built-in urge to wander. We are by nature a restless species, ever on the lookout for new and exotic lands, but our planetary surface no longer offers the mysteries it once did. It is true that we scarcely know our oceans, but it is reasonable to expect that the day is coming when we will know them all too well. There is only one place left for the restless and adventurous to turn, and that is to space. One could go on about the possible future material benefits of space research, but I will not, because I think the enterprise still worthy of our efforts even if we never get any satisfaction from our knowledge but the satisfaction of knowing. An understanding of the heavens can only help us to see our relation to the rest of the universe more clearly, and this is a worthy goal in its own right.