The unimaginable becoming a reality
Print Edition
IMAGING this scene: You are sitting at home and want to read a book. So you order it on Amazon. Minutes later, a drone drops your purchase in your front yard.
No, it’s not science fiction. It’s one of the many innovations of artificial intelligence that promise to change our lives.
It’s all about machines that can be programmed to understand what you want, do what you ask and guess what you need. The robotic functions can even be made to educate themselves and adapt to different tasks.
Still, the most dramatic applications of artificial intelligence are somewhat in the future. Technology engineers are trying to upgrade a computer’s ability to recognize users’ demands.
One existing example of the technology is Apple’s Siri, a voice-controlled personal assistant. It’s still in its infancy, more like a toy than a tool, because users have to talk close up and Siri can’t give accurate responses to all simple verbal queries.
That’s because robots can catch key words but they can’t weigh them yet, said Peng Junhui, founder of Dtrobo.
Here is an example. When asked where you are, a computer may give answers such as “home” or perhaps even “Beijing.” It indeed catches the key words and it may be correct that you are at home in Beijing. But the actual answer you may have sought was, “You are in the living room.”
It’s a similar problem with computer vision, the ability of a computer to gain understanding from digital images or videos.
“Many of us install monitoring cameras at home for safety, but one troubling aspect is that every time something passes, even a falling leaf or a walking dog, the system will send out an alarm,” said Davy Wang, Solutions Architect, regional leader, at AWS China.
According to Wang Haofen, chief technology officer from Shenzhen Gowild Robotics Co, a voice-and-image recognition system is badly needed in the car industry to free up drivers from the minutiae of the steering wheel.
Wang added, “Most carmakers use radar, which is expensive but accurate, in driverless cars. But cameras are cheap and they can capture more information. The problem is they may make fatal judgments.”
So what will happen once all these difficulties are overcome.
Let’s go back to Amazon as an example. The company’s recommendation system can predict what you might like to read based on your past purchase history. And it can dispatch drones to deliver books you may need around your house before you order.
Yes, there’s some way to go, and some people still worry about robots taking us over, as many blockbuster movies portray.
According to Zhong Yixin, former chairman of the China Artificial Intelligence Association, it’s all nonsense.
Or, as Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Chinese Internet giant Baidu, has noted, “Fearing a rise of killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars.”
However, a recent BBC report conjectured that the real risk we face may be placing too much trust in the smart systems we are building.
According to the British report, that could produce the wrong result because machines will reflect flaws of us and could change our relationship to the real world.
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