Hal 9000, from the film 2001 a Space Odyssey |
Terms such as smart and artificial intelligence are
being abused lately. Let’s look at some recent news that have appeared in
various media:
- Smart benches with solar
energy free mobile charge, and access to Wi-Fi.
These public street benches, installed in London by Ford, incorporate a
Wi-Fi repeater and a solar plate that gives them power to charge a mobile
phone battery. Where is the intelligence in the bench? Nowhere. The intelligence
belongs to the human being who invented these devices. In a similar case,
we would be saying that our houses are smart because they have electricity
and an Internet connection.
- China
implements smart trash cans. In this case
the waste bin also incorporates a solar panel connected to a mobile phone
charger. In the future they will also have a Wi-Fi repeater and a device
to disinfect the garbage with ultraviolet rays. As in the previous case,
the mere presence of an electrical or electronic device is confused with
intelligence.
- Goodyear
tests a tire that predicts when it must be changed. The
tire has a built-in wireless sensor that detects when it needs to be
replaced and issues the corresponding warning. Although this case is
somewhat more complex than the previous two, something is again called smart
when it isn’t. To implement this, you just need a sensor and a simple
electronic device, more or less equivalent to those radio devices that since
decades have been incorporated to wild animals, to follow their
displacements and watch their activities.
As you can see, what
is now called smart
is just what was formerly called automatic. But of course, the word smart
is more appealing, that’s why it’s being abused. In the same way, there is a tendency to call artificial intelligence what formerly was called computer science.
John McCarthy |
What is artificial
intelligence? The term was invented in 1956 by John McCarthy, during
a seminar that took place in Dartmouth College, Hanover, U.S.A. Blinded by the
recent advances in computer design, the attendees to the seminar predicted that
in ten years smart
programs would be available that would defeat the world chess
champion, together with other programs that would make perfect translations between any
two human languages. The first objective was achieved, not ten, rather forty
years later; the second has not been achieved yet (see another
article in this blog).
The most accepted
definition of artificial intelligence during the first decades of its history
was the following:
A computer program that processes symbolic information
heuristically.
Symbolic information
is not strictly numerical information. For example, texts; or the symbolic
representation of the positions of the pieces on a chessboard. Heuristics means
relying on experience, rather than using pre-established algorithms.
There are two very
different types of artificial intelligence:
- Weak artificial intelligence: a
set of applications researched for decades, where interesting advances
have been made. I will mention some:
- Automatic theorem proving
- Games
usually considered intelligent
- Processing
of texts written in a human language (including automatic translation)
- Image recognition
- Expert systems
- Neural networks
- Smart agents
- Automatic learning
- Strong artificial intelligence: this
is the real artificial intelligence, the construction of machines capable
of competing with man, not in just one concrete activity (like playing
chess), but in many. This branch of artificial intelligence is not yet feasible,
although the media, plus a few so-called experts, have been spreading
false information and announcing its imminent birth since thirty years ago.
In the next post, I
will discuss when real experts predict that we can expect to get a true strong
artificial intelligence.
Manuel Alfonseca
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