Read more: “Instant Expert: Artificial intelligence“
The notion of the ultra-intelligent machine – one that can surpass human thinking on any subject – was introduced in 1965 by mathematician I. J. Good, who worked with Alan Turing at Bletchley Park, the UK’s centre for coding and code-breaking during the second world war. Good noted that “the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make”, because from then on, the machines would be designing other, ever-better machines, and there would be no work left for humans to do.
Over the past decade or so, AI researcher Ray Kurzweil has further popularised this notion, calling it the technological singularity, or the tipping point at which ultra-intelligent machines so radically alter our society that we can’t predict how life will change afterwards.
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In response, some have fearfully predicted that these intelligent machines will dispense with useless humans – mirroring the plot of The Matrix – while others see a utopian future filled with endless leisure.
Focusing on these equally unlikely outcomes has distracted the conversation from the very real societal effects already brought about by the increasing pace of technological change. For 100,000 years, we relied on the hard labour of small bands of hunter-gatherers. A scant 200 years ago we moved to an industrial society that shifted most manual labour to machines. And then, just one generation ago, we made the transition into the digital age. Today much of what we manufacture is information, not physical objects – bits, not atoms. Computers are ubiquitous tools, and much of our manual labour has been replaced by calculations.
A similar acceleration is taking place in robotics. The robots you can buy today to vacuum your floor appeal mainly to technophiles. But within a decade there will be an explosion of uses for robots in the office and home. Some will be completely autonomous, others will be tele-operated by a human. Science fiction author Robert Heinlein predicted this development in 1942; remote human operators of his Waldo robots wore gloves that translated their every motion to make a remote robot perform tasks ranging from micro-surgery to maintenance.
Personally, I think that the last invention we need ever make is the partnership of human and tool. Paralleling the move from mainframe computers in the 1970s to personal computers today, most AI systems went from being standalone entities to being tools that are used in a human-machine partnership.
Our tools will get ever better as they embody more intelligence. And we will become better as well, able to access ever more information and education. We may hear less about AI and more about IA, that is to say “intelligence amplification”. In movies we will still have to worry about the machines taking over, but in real life humans and their sophisticated tools will move forward together.