The dawn of artificial intelligence
Clever computers
The dawn of artificial intelligence
Powerful computers will reshape humanity’s future. How to
ensure the promise outweighs the perils
May 9th 2015 |
From the print edition
“THE development of full artificial intelligence could
spell the end of the human race,” Stephen Hawking warns. Elon Musk fears that
the development of artificial intelligence, or AI, may be the biggest
existential threat humanity faces. Bill Gates urges people to beware of it.
Dread that the abominations people create will become
their masters, or their executioners, is hardly new. But voiced by a renowned
cosmologist, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and the founder of Microsoft—hardly
Luddites—and set against the vast investment in AI by big firms like Google and
Microsoft, such fears have taken on new weight. With supercomputers in every
pocket and robots looking down on every battlefield, just dismissing them as
science fiction seems like self-deception. The question is how to worry wisely.
The first step is to understand what computers can now do
and what they are likely to be able to do in the future. Thanks to the rise in
processing power and the growing abundance of digitally available data, AI is
enjoying a boom in its capabilities.
Today’s “deep learning” systems, by mimicking the layers
of neurons in a human brain and crunching vast amounts of data, can teach
themselves to perform some tasks, from pattern recognition to translation,
almost as well as humans can. As a result, things that once called for a
mind—from interpreting pictures to playing the video game “Frogger”—are now
within the scope of computer programs. DeepFace, an algorithm unveiled by Facebook
in 2014, can recognise individual human faces in images 97% of the time.
Crucially, this capacity is narrow and specific. Today’s
AI produces the semblance of intelligence through brute number-crunching force,
without any great interest in approximating how minds equip humans with
autonomy, interests and desires. Computers do not yet have anything approaching
the wide, fluid ability to infer, judge and decide that is associated with
intelligence in the conventional human sense.
Yet AI is already powerful enough to make a dramatic
difference to human life. It can already enhance human endeavour by
complementing what people can do. Think of chess, which computers now play
better than any person. The best players in the world are not machines however,
but what Garry Kasparov, a grandmaster, calls “centaurs”: amalgamated teams of
humans and algorithms. Such collectives will become the norm in all sorts of
pursuits: supported by AI, doctors will have a vastly augmented ability to spot
cancers in medical images; speech-recognition algorithms running on smartphones
will bring the internet to many millions of illiterate people in developing
countries; digital assistants will suggest promising hypotheses for academic
research; image-classification algorithms will allow wearable computers to
layer useful information onto people’s views of the real world.
Even in the short run, not all the consequences will be
positive. Consider, for instance, the power that AI brings to the apparatus of
state security, in both autocracies and democracies. The capacity to monitor
billions of conversations and to pick out every citizen from the crowd by his
voice or her face poses grave threats to liberty.
And even when there are broad gains for society, many
individuals will lose out from AI. The original “computers” were drudges, often
women, who performed endless calculations for their higher-ups. Just as
transistors took their place, so AI will probably turf out whole regiments of
white-collar workers. Education and training will help and the wealth produced
with the aid of AI will be spent on new pursuits that generate new jobs. But
workers are doomed to dislocations.
Surveillance and dislocations are not, though, what
worries Messrs Hawking, Musk and Gates, or what inspires a phalanx of
futuristic AI films that Hollywood has recently unleashed onto cinema screens.
Their concern is altogether more distant and more apocalyptic: the threat of
autonomous machines with superhuman cognitive capacity and interests that
conflict with those of Homo sapiens.
Such artificially intelligent beings are still a very
long way off; indeed, it may never be possible to create them. Despite a
century of poking and prodding at the brain, psychologists, neurologists,
sociologists and philosophers are still a long way from an understanding of how
a mind might be made—or what one is. And the business case for even limited
intelligence of the general sort—the sort that has interests and autonomy—is
far from clear. A car that drives itself better than its owner sounds like a
boon; a car with its own ideas about where to go, less so.
...I know how to curse
But even if the prospect of what Mr Hawking calls “full”
AI is still distant, it is prudent for societies to plan for how to cope. That
is easier than it seems, not least because humans have been creating autonomous
entities with superhuman capacities and unaligned interests for some time.
Government bureaucracies, markets and armies: all can do things which unaided,
unorganised humans cannot. All need autonomy to function, all can take on life
of their own and all can do great harm if not set up in a just manner and
governed by laws and regulations.
These parallels should comfort the fearful; they also
suggest concrete ways for societies to develop AI safely. Just as armies need
civilian oversight, markets are regulated and bureaucracies must be transparent
and accountable, so AI systems must be open to scrutiny. Because systems
designers cannot foresee every set of circumstances, there must also be an
off-switch. These constraints can be put in place without compromising
progress. From the nuclear bomb to traffic rules, mankind has used technical
ingenuity and legal strictures to constrain other powerful innovations.
The spectre of eventually creating an autonomous
non-human intelligence is so extraordinary that it risks overshadowing the
debate. Yes, there are perils. But they should not obscure the huge benefits
from the dawn of AI.
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