AI reaching new heights

Artificial intelligence reaching new heights
Seda Terzyan, Bruin senior staff
Published: Wednesday, November 5, 2008

As technology continues to progress exponentially, human intelligence follows a similar pattern by combining the abilities of the brain with those of computers.

“We’re probably not too far from a time when an intelligent agent program could assist with our electronic communication,” said Phillip Duncan, senior technology strategist at the UCLA Institute for Technology Advancement.

Artificial intelligence will soon be able to mimic a human, allowing one to simultaneously speak with different people through electronic communication networks. This means that our computer agents could potentially respond for us in certain circumstances, giving us more time to attend to important matters, he added.

“Our agent responds to an instant message from our boss while we are on the phone with someone else or assists us in chatting with seven people simultaneously in Second Life. On our behalf, our agents might answer simple questions such as when we plan to leave work or whether we’ll be in town over the weekend,” Duncan said. “They could engage in idle chit-chat and joking in a style that would be indistinguishable from ourselves. If the agent became stumped, it would alert us to take over the conversation.”

People do not realize it, but we already have advanced artificial intelligence all around us in its more subtle forms, said Judea Pearl, professor of computer science at UCLA.

The simple act of searching on particular sites on the Internet allows the computer to analyze your interests and decide what sorts of advertisements to show you, Pearl said.

“Computers are already able to reason,” he added. “Eventually search engines like Google will be able to understand full questions and search for particular articles instead of just matching key words.”

By analyzing vast amounts of data and having uninterrupted access to almost unlimited amounts of information computers can process information at speeds and accuracy impossible to the human brain.

“Computers do many things better than us,” said Richard Korf, professor of computer science at UCLA. “There are already machines that make simple decisions for us like authorizing your credit card by analyzing your financial history.”

It may not be obvious since we don’t have robots walking around and interacting with us, Korf said, but artificial intelligence agents are gradually creeping in and becoming more integrated in the social fabric of our world.

From the global positioning system in your car which recognizes your voice to the ability to conduct a medical diagnosis, computers have an active role everywhere and humans are becoming more and more dependent on their ability to process information. But, though they can do many things better than us, the human brain works differently, Pearl said.

In 1997, a computer beat the reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in a match. The processing power of computers today is 300 times greater, but humans still come close to winning, even with the close to unlimited storage power of a computer, Pearl said.

Humans are unique because they have consciousness, Pearl said, the ability to have a model of yourself and the illusion of free will is what needs to be programmed to make robots with artificial intelligence indistinguishable from humans.

However, mimicking the human brain has proven to be a difficult task since scientists today know more about computers than about the human brain, Duncan said.

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