I am not a Robot I am a Unicorn ~ Will AI Doom us?
Artificial Intelligence
Now that is a new fangled topic that is all the rage especially in Hive with all the hullabaloo in relation to rewards pool abuse.
Here's the rub, Artificial Intelligence is older than me, and most likely it is older than you.
Today we are going to do a bit of exploring around AI or as you would say in Spanish IA.
Of course in keeping with the topic for this post, the lead image has been generated from my prompt by the AI feature of my premium pixlr.com membership
I went to my AI tool on Google which is called Bard and this is what Bard said in response to my prompt
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that deals with the creation of intelligent agents, which are systems that can reason, learn, and act autonomously.
There are many different approaches to AI, but they all share the goal of creating machines that can think and act like humans.
Are we Doomed?
Impending destruction always reminds me of Private Fraser in the old British Sitcom Dad's Army and in his very Scottish Highlands voice saying ....
Before I give my thoughts on our impending destruction or otherwise let's go back and discover ... well discover who discovered AI so to speak!
The Famous 5 - Founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence
Alan Turing, Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, John McCarthy, and Marvin Minsky are generally considered to be the five founding fathers of the technology that has come to be known as Artifical Intelligence.
Some of those names might seem familiar to you, especially the first (Alan Turing), who many consider to be THE founding father of AI.
Oh did I say he was British? No? Well I am now!
Alan Turing (1912-1954)
Turing played a crucial role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Axis powers in WWII.
Think the film The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch & Keira Knightley.
Fun Fact... Cumberbatch are Turing are actually related and are 17th cousins! The fluffing odds of that!
In 1947 Turing gave the first (probably) public lecture to mention computer intelligence. “What we want is a machine that can learn from experience,” and that the “possibility of letting the machine change its own instructions provides the mechanism for this” were his words to The Mathematical Society.
The AI Manifesto
Many of the ideas the British founding father introduced in “Intelligent Machinery”, a 1948 report which included many of the central concepts of AI and were later reinvented by other people (the cheeky fluffers).
I could write numerous books about Alan Turing, but if you want more info and to see actual facsimiles of his original documents then go visit http://www.alanturing.net/index.htm . It's absolutely fascinating and I have spent the last 36 hours immersed in his works and some of the other founding fathers.
The Turing Test
In a paper in 1950 he introduced us to test that could find out if a computer is intelligent enough to pass as a human being.
It involved a computer, a human interrogator, and a human interviewee. The conversations are made via a keyboard and a display screen.
Do you know that it was not until 2014 that a computer finally passed the test!
A.M. Turing Award
In 1966 the ACM initiated the A.M. Turing Award to recognize contributions of lasting and major technical importance to the computing field” complete with a $1 million prize! It is frequently referred to as the computer science equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
Allen Newell (1927-1992) & Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001)
These two collaborated together in computer science since the 1950's.
They founded probably the world’s first hub dedicated to studying AI at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). This was where the General Problem Solver machine was built!
The hotshot AI duo received a ton of rewards including the A.M. Turing Award in 1975.
John McCarthy (1927-2011)
In 1956 McCarthy together with Claude Shannon and Marvin Minsky organized an event. The subject was called “artificial intelligence” by McCarthy for the conference.
Was this the only reason why McCarthy is often thought of as the Father of Artificial Intelligence because he named it?
Fluff no, he did loads more!
He was given the A.M. Turing Award four years before Simon & Newell were given theirs.
He invented the List Processing Language, or Lisp, the programming language that became the standard tool for artificial intelligence research and design.
Marvin Minsky (1927-2016)
Minsky believed that a human mind was no different from a computer.
I bet he never got inside the mind of Matilda, fluff me if he had, I think he would have changed his mind!
His most significant impact on AI and the one that scares the shit out of me, was his goal to endow machines with intelligence eventually.
While people were predicting the end of civilisation due to AI, Minsk believed that AI could eventually solve some of humanity’s most pressing problems.
But don't some of our most amazingly good creations turn into evil when in the hands of a complete basketcase?
Minsky was one of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab cofounders and was awarded the A.M. Turing Award in 1969.
Your Tengo bonus ~ AI founding mother!
So let's not be sexist, what about the women?
Here is a cracking list of 12 Mothers of AI but as the word count is getting pretty long I am going to leave you who I believe is right up there as the Mother of AI.
Of course, she is British, did I mention that!
Margaret Masterman—The Computer Speech Pathologist
The founder of the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU), Margaret Masterman is often credited as a pioneer of research in computational linguistics, with her research beginning in the 1950s. Specifically, she focused on semantics vs. syntax—or making sure computers could differentiate between a phrase that is simply grammatically correct and one with reasonable, deeper meaning. She also studied ambiguity and its effects on natural language, interpreting the meaning of images, and the recognition of analogy and metaphors as part of language.
Are there benefits of AI?
Of course there fluffing are!
Off the top of my head, my favourite I will say is Alexa. Alexa is Amazon's voice AI and lives in the cloud and is happy to help anywhere there's internet access!
Let's have a think about more ways. AI could help us to:
- solve fluffing hard problems that would be difficult or nigh on impossible for us humans to solve on our own.
- automate tasks, which can free up our time for other activities (or take over our jobs of course)
- make better decisions by providing us with more information and insights (GPS/Sat Nav now Maps for example).
- transport ourselves. You know a driverless bus now operates between Fife and Edinburgh. There is a driver on board of course.
- find new or alternative income streams
- make money on the stock or cryptocurrency markets or exchanges. I will be exploring some trading bots in my next article.
There are a host of benefits that AI can give us, but and here it comes, BUT there are also some potential risks associated with AI. I am going to list my top 3, two already exist...
AI could ...
- be used to manipulate people or spread misinformation. Just look at Social Media! War what war!
- lead to job losses, as machines become capable of doing more and more tasks that are currently done by humans. This has been happening for years so no idea why people are only now starting get worried.
- be used to create autonomous weapons that could kill without human intervention, or manipulate humans to weapons of mass destruction.
AI in the future
You know what makes me laugh.
So many technology leaders saying we need to halt AI advancement because it could endanger us as a species.
I mean seriously, GTF you are the fluffing fluffers who have been doing said advancement not us the ordinary person!
The Bottom Line
It is important to be aware of both the benefits and risks of AI as it continues to develop.
We need to ensure that AI is used for good and not for evil.
We also need to make sure that AI is developed in a responsible way that takes into account the potential risks.
However a glance through the history of the human species, shows to me that we are not a responsible species, and I worry for the generations coming behind me.
Thanks for visiting and enjoy the rest of your day!
All images and ramblings are from me, the mad Scotsman TengoLoTodo unless identified in the post text.
@tengolotodo.leo for (@tengolotodo) May 21st 2023
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That's brilliant, thank you!
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I think machines that can take over human jobs are often good. They certainly aren't evil of themselves, even if they're sometimes used in bad ways.
Let's say you are a baker. You get up at 3am to mix flour, yeast and water into a dough, knead it, shape the loaves, bake them, and your family sells them in your bread shop. Then you invent a machine that can knead four times as much dough in the same time! All you have to do is get up at 3am and fill it up, then you can sit down and read a good book until it's time for the rest of the work. And then you figure out a machine that can pour the flour and other ingredients into the first machine, so you can sleep in! And a machine that will shape the loaves and toss them in the oven for you! Not only are you making 4 times as many loaves, you also have more time for other things. And since you hopefully don't need four times as much money as you previously earned, you can lower the price of your bread a little, which makes it more affordable to me!
Of course, now you are producing as much bread as you and three other bakers did, so the other three will have to find something else to do. Or you could all play nice, keep making the same amount of loaves as earlier, and all of you get to have some extra free time. Maybe meet up with the others for a game of darts in the Baker's Guild house? Or go on a picnic!
What I'm trying to get at, in my longwinded way, is that whoever said that a 40-hour week is good and reasonable should go home and have another think. Life is meant to be enjoyed, not endured.
And to think but for Henry Ford the normal working week might still be far higher than 40 hours!
I loved this, but ...
How I wish that would be true! The problem now is we have become so focused on price we have killed off so many small producers that the bigger ones only care about money and keeping their shareholders happy.
Life is short and we should enjoy what we do. 40 hours is ridiculous but in saying that, when I was managing projects with equipment shutdowns involved my work week was twice that.
It can work though! There was an article in one of our newspapers recently about a fishmonger who got tired of the price hikes and fewer customers every day, so she lowered the prices by 10% on everything. Now she has a lot more customers, who buy a lot more fish - at a lower profit per kilo for her, true - and makes more money than before. Last I heard she was considering lowering the prices even more, since she didn't need to earn quite that much! Unfortunately for me her shop is located in another part of the country, so I'll have to make do with the frozen tilapia from my local store.
Quite the information you have here. And yes, Machines have always been doing the work. I wonder why it's now that the people are worried about the future.
Well because chatGPT is in their faces. People are pretty thick and act like sheep so it is not surprising that they are only getting worried now and even then it is only because they have been told to!
You sound a lot like a woo-man!
What the fluff is a woo-man?
You know.. you own some Woo right? Then a man you are
Interesting post - thats really interesting about the test and it not being passed until 2014. It is certainly an area that is growing pretty quickly at the moment, and it will be interesting to see where it will be even in a decades time !
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These are interesting facts, Tito Ed. And it did remind me of an article I've read yesterday of governments trying to come up with regulations for the use of AI. I wonder if they can even catch up.