• Question: Do you think that Artifical Intelligences are a possibility?

    Asked by aimeej to Andrew, Daniel, Hayley, Natalia, Peta on 16 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Hayley Smith

      Hayley Smith answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      The world of artificial intelligence is growing massively. “AI” as it is know is an important subject in computer science and there are many different approaches. There are examples of people creating computer programs or algorithms that allow machines to learn – I think this is pretty crazy! Most of it is to do with recognising patterns. I’m really not sure how fast this will develop but some people out there must think it’s possible, otherwise they probably wouldn’t be spending lots of time and money researching it!

    • Photo: Daniel Scully

      Daniel Scully answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      “Artifical Intelligence” is used for many things in computer science, and can refer to many different tasks.

      Computer programs that can be used to identify complex patterns (we use these in particle physics to identify what sort of particle was in our detector) or learn from previous experiences, or imitate human behaviour (like conversations in instant messengers).

      As to whether a computer can ever be creative, like a human, I personally doubt that. But who knows?

    • Photo: Andrew Cairns

      Andrew Cairns answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      The possibility scares me!

    • Photo: Peta Foster

      Peta Foster answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      Great question and what an amazing subject to get involved with…

      … I think so yes. I actually think it is only a matter of time. How close to human-like we can get i do not know but if you imagine that there are about 100 billion neurons in the brain (cells transmitting and receiving data… electrical signals) and 100 trillion synapses (links between neurons.. for the transmission of information) then you are talking about a lot of data processing even just assuming this very simplistic calculation would mean a processor of 100TB of RAM… normal computers don’t even have that as a hard drive…

      … then considering that our brains are the worlds best parallel processors (neural networks) then you need to somehow develop artificial neural networking for the computer version of the brain.

      Can it be done though…
      … well i have the feeling that as we are just getting more and more advanced then the ability of computers will also keep progressing… and i think it is very likely that we will end up with robots/machines that are very very difficult to tell from humans. They can already make robots decide what needs to be done to achieve a task and think for its self:

      They can play catch with each other while flying…

      and now they can think and learn and make reasonable decisions:

      Include into this mix the fact that so much information is now available in digital form then a reasonable artificial intelligence would have the resources to learn very quickly. 😀

      Exciting stuff! I myself have worked with a very simple robot arm and i found that a lot of fun 😀

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