One way to think about the future of AI is to consider milestones AI hasn’t reached yet. Current soccer robots aren’t quite ready to take on human professionals, and Siri still has a lot of trouble understanding exactly what I’m saying. For every AI system, we can try and list what abilities would take the current technology to the next level.
In 2014, for example, the Society of Automotive Engineers attempted to do just that for self-driving cars. They defined five levels of automation. For each additional level, they expected that the AI controlling the car can do more without human help. At level 1, the cruise control automatically accelerates and decelerates to keep the car at a constant speed, but everything else is on the human driver. At level 3, the car is basically on its own. It’s driving, monitoring its surroundings, navigating, and so on. but a human driver will need to take over if something goes wrong, like really bad weather or a downed powerline. And at level 5, the human driver can just sit back, and read articles or watch your favorite movies while the car takes them to work through rush-hour traffic. And obviously, we don’t have cars with the technology to do all this yet. But these levels are a way to evaluate how far we’ve come, and how far our research still has to go. We can even think about other AIs using “levels of automation", for example, maybe we have level 1 AI assistants right now that can set alarms for us, but we still need to double-check their work. But what are levels 2 through 5? What milestones would need to be achieved for AI to be as good as a human assistant?
We wouldn’t just judge how “real” a robot’s fake human skin looks. As Turing put it: “We do not wish to penalize the machine for its inability to shine in beauty competitions, nor to penalize a man for losing in a race against an airplane. This idea suggests a unified goal for AI, an artificial general intelligence. But over the last 70 years, AI researchers focused on subfields like computer vision, knowledge representation, economic markets, planning, and so on. Even though we’re not sure if Artificial General Intelligence is possible many communities are doing interdisciplinary research, and many AI researchers are taking baby steps to combine specialized subfields. This involves projects like teaching a robot to understand language, or teaching an AI system that models the stock market to read the news and better understand market fluctuations. To be clear, most of AI is still science fiction. we’re nowhere near Blade Runner, Her, or any similar movies. Before we get too excited about combining everything we’ve built to achieve AGI, we should remember that we still don’t know how to make specialized AIs for most problems. Some subfields are making progress more quickly than others and we’re seeing AI systems pop up in lots of places with awesome potential.
To build AI systems we need lots of data to train new algorithms. It used to be hard to collect training data, going to libraries to copy facts, and transcribe books. But now, a lot of data is already digital. For example, If you want to know what’s happening on the other side of the planet, you can download newspapers or grab tweets from the Twitter API. Interested in hyperlocal weather prediction? You can combine free data from the weather service with personal weather stations to help know when to water your plants. And if you feed that data into a robot gardener, you could build a fully automated weather-knowing plant-growing food-making garden! Maker communities around the globe are combining data, AI, and cheap hardware to create the future and personalize AI technologies. While imagining an AI/human utopia is exciting, we have to be realistic, too. In many industries, automation doesn’t only enhance human activities, it can replace humans entirely. Truck, delivery, and tractor drivers are some of the most common jobs in the US as of 2014. If self-driving vehicles revolutionize transportation in the near future, will all those people lose their jobs? We can’t know for sure, but Gödel Prize-winning Computer Science Professor Moshe Vardi points out that this is already the trend in some industries. For example, U.S. manufacturing output will likely keep rising, but manufacturing jobs have been decreasing a lot. Plus, computers use energy, and that means we’re not getting any benefits from AI for free. Massive amounts of machines running these algorithms can have a substantial carbon footprint. On top of that, as we’ve discussed, you have to be pretty careful when it comes to trusting AI systems because they often end up with all kinds of biases you may not want.
So we have to consider the benefits of massive AI deployment with the costs. In a now-famous story from a few years ago, Target figured out a woman was pregnant based on her shopping history, and they sent her maternity coupons. But she was still in high school, so her family saw the mail, even though she hadn’t told them. Do we want our data being used like this, and potentially revealing personal details? Or what about the government. Should it be allowed to track people with facial recognition installed on cameras at intersections? When we provide companies location data from our phones we could help them build better traffic models so we can get to places faster. Cities could improve bus routes, but it also means, someone is always watching you. AI could also track your friends and family, where you shopped, ate, and who you hung out with. If statistics have shown that people who leave home late at night are more likely to commit a crime and an AI knows you left (even though it’s just for some late-night cookie dough), should it call the police to watch you, just in case? So, we can go down any number of scary thought experiments. And there’s a lot to consider when it comes to the future of AI.
AI is a really new tool and it’s great that so many people have access to it, but that also means there are very few laws or protections about what they can and can’t do. Innovations in AI have awesome potential to make positive changes, but there are also plenty of risks, especially if the technology advances faster than the average person’s understanding of it. It’s probably the most accurate to say that the future is complicated. And the most important thing we can do is be educated and involved in AI as the field changes. What you think about the future of AI? write in the comments below.
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