Table Of ContentArtificial Intelligence
The Future of Humankind
Contents
Introduction: How A.I. Is Transforming Our World
The Age of Intelligence
The Deep-Learning Revolution
A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence
Machines in the Military
Cosmic Intelligence
The Computer Will See You Now
Caution: Robots Working
Q&A: Assessing the Future
The User-Friendly Vision
Command Performance
High-Tech Toys Are Here to Play
The Future Is Coming Home
A Lesson in Communication
Self-Driving Cars Are Safer Than You
Smarter Than Us?
From the Archives: Will the Computer Outwit Man?
System Upgrade
Hollywood Gets Smart
In the Mind of Humankind
Parts of this edition were previously published by TIME and Fortune.
INTRODUCTION:
How A.I. Is Transforming Our World
Artificial intelligence is spreading into our homes, our
jobs, our hospitals—and outer space
By Matt Vella
The field of artificial intelligence research was born on the leafy campus of
Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956. Over the course of six weeks, a small
group of mathematicians and scientists met daily on the top floor of the college’s
math department, abandoned by students and faculty for the midyear break. The
workshop amounted to an extended brainstorming session, forgoing directed
group research in favor of freewheeling discussion and debate. The group,
credited with coining the term “artificial intelligence,” proposed to show “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.” They went on:
“We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these
problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a
summer.”
It may have been a midcentury humblebrag, but they did what they set out to
do. And in the process, they founded the discipline now clearly on the verge of
revolutionizing the world. Artificial intelligence, as the pages that follow show,
is poised to dramatically change everything from how astronomers explore the
edges of our universe to whether your stereo understands you were asking for
more John Lennon, not John Legend. Almost all the hallmarks of our current
more John Lennon, not John Legend. Almost all the hallmarks of our current
technological moment—talkative digital personal assistants like Siri and Alexa,
genomic-research breakthroughs, instantaneous language translation, self-
driving cars—have at their foundation one key, if broad, thing in common:
artificial intelligence, or A.I. Several decades after that summer of theory at
Dartmouth, the field is experiencing something akin to the Cambrian explosion,
the geological era when most higher animal species suddenly burst onto the
Earth.
What few realize is that all these breakthroughs are, in fact, one big
breakthrough. They have more or less been made possible by a subset of A.I.
known as deep learning, or deep neural networks, as academics refer to them.
These concepts, some of which were debated at Dartmouth all those decades
ago, essentially describe self-teaching computer programs. Rather than
programming for every conceivable scenario, engineers have given the
computers behind, say, advanced voice recognition a learning algorithm and
proceeded to feed it terabytes of data—years’ worth of speech samples, for
example. Then the computer attempts to figure it out for itself. This basic
formula is being repeated in medical diagnoses, self-piloting vehicles, crash-
proof drones, you name it. The combination of today’s vast computational power
and the enormous storehouse of data that is the internet proved to be the catalyst
to make the A.I. revolution move from theory to world-changing practice.
This volume explores the recent evolution of that practice. Roger Parloff’s
story on the deep-learning revolution shows how broad the A.I. movement has
become in recent years, and the thread of his argument extends to fields ranging
from the military and astronomy to medicine and the labor market. Other stories
in this special edition show how A.I. is creeping into our day-to-day lives,
especially in the ever-smarter technology consumers find they can’t live without
—their phones and voice-controlled home gadgets and so on. The final section
looks at the culture’s attempts to quantify and understand what all of this means.
What this book will not do is try to scare you about the impending doom for
humanity A.I. supposedly represents. This has been a common trope of science
fiction for decades and, more recently, a crutch a little too easily leaned on by
Hollywood, from Terminator to the latest Avengers. Evil A.I. is, after all, the
literal deus ex machina.
To be sure, some very smart people legitimately fret over the future of A.I. In
2014, Stephen Hawking didn’t mince words with the BBC, saying, “The
development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”
Elon Musk, the multi-hyphenate genius behind PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla, says
Elon Musk, the multi-hyphenate genius behind PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla, says
the technology is “potentially more dangerous than nukes.” He nevertheless
maintains some investment in the field to keep an eye on its advancements.
“With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon,” Musk once said.
“In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy
water, it’s like—yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out.”
Perhaps. But as plentiful as the advances have been in recent years, the so-called
singularity—the period of machines capable of reasoning exceeding the human
mind—is still nowhere in sight. Even those most wary of A.I.’s advancement
and future admit this in conversation sooner or later.
The anxiety around A.I. is part of a much deeper vein of fear. Because, though
that summer of 1956 was a fundamental turning point, the absolute history of
A.I. began in antiquity, with myths and stories of artificial beings endowed with
consciousness by master craftsmen. As Pamela McCorduck, a prolific historian
of A.I., put it, artificial intelligence began as “an ancient wish to forge the gods.”
Examples include the mechanical beings that appear in Greek myths, such as
Pygmalion’s Galatea and the golden robots of Hephaestus. Middle Ages rumors
told of secret alchemical means of imbuing matter with mind: there was Jabir ibn
Hayyan’s Takwin, Paracelsus’s homunculus and Rabbi Judah Loew’s Golem,
for example. By the 19th century, similar ideas had become cornerstones of
Mary Shelley’s and, later, Karel Čapek’s fiction. Human beings, in other words,
have been preoccupied with the idea of artificial intelligence—its potential and
its potential pitfalls—for a very long time. And now a new era begins.
IBM Watson
Russian rescue robot FEDOR
