Is Artificial Intelligence Here?
I, Eugene Goostman
The thought of artificial intelligence and the hopes and fears that are associated with its rise are fairly prevalent inside our common subconscious. Whether we imagine Judgement Day at the hands of Skynet or egalitarian totalitarianism at the hands of V.I.K.I and her army of robots - the outcomes will be the same - the equivocal displacement of humans because the dominant life forms on the planet.
Some might call it the fears of a technophobic mind, others a tame prophecy. And if the recent findings at the University of Reading (U.K.) are any indication, we might have already begun fulfilling said prophecy. In early June 2014 a historic achievement was supposedly achieved - the passage of the eternal Turing Test by way of a computer programme. Being hailed and derided around the world to be either the birth of artificial intelligence or a clever trickster-bot that only proved technical skill respectively, the programme referred to as Eugene Goostman may soon become a name embedded ever sold.
The programme or Eugene (to his friends) was originally created in 2001 by Vladimir Veselov from Russia and Eugene Demchenko from Ukraine. Since then it's been developed to simulate the personality and conversational patterns of a 13 year old boy and was competing against four other programmes ahead out victorious. The Turing Test happened at the world famous Royal Society in London and is considered the most comprehensively designed tests ever. The requirements for a computer programme to pass the Turing Test are simple yet difficult - the ability to convince a human being that the entity that they are speaking with is another individual at least 30 % of the time.
Helpful hints in London garnered Eugene a 33 percent success rating making it the first programme to pass the Turing Test. The test alone was more challenging because it engaged 300 conversations, with 30 judges or human subjects, against 5 other computer programmes in simultaneous conversations between humans and machines, over five parallel tests. Across all of the instances only Eugene could convince 33 percent of the human judges that it had been a human boy. Constructed with algorithms that support "conversational logic" and openended topics, Eugene opened up a complete new reality of intelligent machines capable of fooling humans.
With implications in neuro-scientific artificial intelligence, cyber-crime, philosophy and metaphysics, its humbling to know that Eugene is only version 1.0 and its own creators are already focusing on something more sophisticated and advanced.
Love in the Time of Social A.I.s
So, should humanity just begin overall its affairs, ready to hand over ourselves to your emerging overlords? No. Not necessarily. Despite the interesting outcomes of the Turing Test, most scientists in neuro-scientific artificial intelligence aren't that impressed. The veracity and validity of the Test itself is definitely discounted as we've discovered an increasing number of about intelligence, consciousness and the trickery of computer programmes. In fact, the internet has already been flooded with many of his unknown kin as a written report by Incapsula Research showed that nearly 62 percent of all web traffic is generated by automated computer programs commonly known as bots. Some of these bots act as social hacking tools that engage humans online in chats pretending to be real people (mostly women strangely enough) and luring them to malicious websites. The point that we have been already battling a silent war for less pop-up chat alerts is perhaps a nascent indication of the war we may need to face - not deadly but definitely annoying. An extremely real threat from these pseudoartificial intelligence powered chatbots was found to be in a particular bot called "Text- Girlie". This flirtatious and engaging chat bot would use advanced social hacking techniques to trick humans to visit dangerous websites. The TextGirlie proactively would scour publicly available social network data and contact people on their visibly shared mobile numbers. The chatbot would send them messages pretending to be a real girl and ask them to chat in a private online room. The fun, colourful and titillating conversation would quickly result in invitations to go to webcam sites or dating websites by clicking on links - and that when the trouble would begin. This scam affected over 15 million people over a period of months before there is any clear awareness amongst users that it had been a chatbot that fooled all of them. The highly likely delay was simply related to embarrassment at having been conned by way of a machine that slowed up the spread of the threat and just would go to show how easily human beings could be manipulated by seemingly intelligent machines.
Intelligent life on our world
Its easy to snigger at the misfortune of these who've fallen victims to programs like Text- Girlie and wonder when there is any intelligent life on Earth, if not other planets but the smugness is temporary. Since most people are already silently and unknowingly dependent on predictive and analytical software for most of their daily needs. These programmes are just an early evolutionary ancestor of the yet to be realised fully functional artificial intelligent systems and also have become integral to your way of life. Using predictive and analytical programmes is prevalent in major industries including food and retail, telecommunications, utility routing, traffic management, financial trading, inventory management, crime detection, weather monitoring and a bunch of other industries at various levels. Since these type of programmes are kept distinguished from artificial intelligence because of their commercial applications its easy not to notice their ephemeral nature. But lets not kid ourselves - any analytical program with access to immense databases for the purposes of predicting patterned behaviour may be the perfect archetype which "real" artificial intelligence programs could be and you will be created.
A significant case-in-point occurred between the tech-savvy community of Reddit users in early 2014. In the catacombs of Reddit forums focused on "dogecoin", a very popular user by the name of "wise_shibe" created some serious conflict in the community. The forums normally devoted to discussing the world of dogecoins was gently disturbed when "wise_shibe" joined in the conversation offering Oriental wisdom by means of clever remarks. The amusing and engaging dialogue provided by "wise_shibe" garnered him many fans, and given the forums facilitation of dogecoin payments, many users made token donations to "wise_shibe" in exchange for his/her "wisdom". However, soon after his rising popularity had earned him an impressive cache of digital currency it was discovered that "wise_shibe" had an odd sense of omniscient timing and a habit of repeating himself. Eventually it was revealed that "wise_shibe" was a bot programmed to draw from the database of proverbs and sayings and post messages on chat threads with related topics. Reddit was pissed.
Luke, Join the Dark Side
If machines programmed by humans can handle learning, growing, imitating and convincing us of these humanity - then who's to argue they aren't intelligent? The question then arises that what nature will these intelligences take on as they grow within society? Technologist and scientists have previously laid much of the bottom work in the form of supercomputers that are with the capacity of deepthinking. Tackling the issue of intelligence piece meal has already resulted in the creation of grandmaster-beating chess machines in the form of Watson and Deep Blue. However, when these titans of calculations are put through kindergarten level intelligence tests they fail miserably in factors of inferencing, intuition, instinct, good sense and applied knowledge.
The opportunity to learn is still limited by their programming. In contrast to these static computational supercomputers more organically designed technologies such as the delightful insect robotics are more hopeful. These "brains in a body" kind of computers are designed to interact with their surroundings and study from experience as any biological organism would. By incorporating the ability to interface with a physical reality these applied artificial intelligences can handle defining their own sense of understanding to the planet. Similar in design to insects or small animals, these machines are aware of their own physicality and also have the programming which allows them to relate with their environment in real-time developing a sense of "experience" and the ability to negotiate with reality.
A far better testament of intelligence than checkmating a grandmaster. The biggest pool of experiential data that any artificially created intelligent machine can simply access is in publicly available social media content. In this regard, Twitter has emerged a clear favourite with an incredible number of distinct individuals and billions of lines of communications for a machine to process and infer. The Twitter-test of intelligence could very well be more contemporarily relevant compared to the Turing Test where in fact the very language of communication is not intelligently modern - since its higher than 140 characters. The Twitter world can be an ecosystems where individuals communicate in blurbs of thoughts and redactions of reason, the modern form of discourse, in fact it is here that the leading edge social bots find greatest acceptance as human beings. These socalled socialbots have been let loose on the Twitterverse by researches leading to very intriguing results.
The ease with which these programmed bots are able to construct a believable personal profile - including aspects like picture and gender - has even fooled Twitter's bot detection systems over 70 percent of the times. The idea that we as a society so ingrained with digital communication and trusting of digital messages can be fooled, has lasting repercussions. Just within the Twitterverse, the trend of using an army of socialbots to generate trending topics, biased opinions, fake support and the illusion of unified diversity can prove very dangerous. In large numbers these socialbots can be used to frame the public discourse on significant topics which are discussed on the digital realm.
This phenomenon is known as "astroturfing" - taking its name from the famous fake grass used in sporting events - where the illusion of "grass-root" fascination with a topic created by socialbots is taken up to be a genuine reflection of the opinions of the population. Wars have started with much less stimulus. Just imagine socialbot powered SMS messages in India threatening certain communities and you also get the idea. But taking things one step further may be the 2013 announcement by Facebook that seeks to combine the "deep thinking" and "deep learning" areas of computers with Facebook's gigantic storehouse of over a billion individual's personal data.
In place looking beyond the "fooling" the humans approach and diving deep into "mimicking" the humans but in a prophetic kind of way - in which a program might potentially even "understand" humans. This program being developed by Facebook is humorously called DeepFace and is currently being touted because of its revolutionary facial recognition technology. But its broader goal would be to survey existing user accounts on the network to predict the user's future activity.
By incorporating pattern recognition, account analysis, location services along with other personal variables, DeepFace is intended to identify and measure the emotional, psychological and physical states of the users. By incorporating the opportunity to bridge the gap between quantified data and its own personal implication, DeepFace may be considered a machine that is capable of empathy. But for now it'll probably just be used to spam users with more targeted ads.
From Syntax to Sentience
Artificial intelligence in every its current form is primitive at best. Just a tool which can be controlled, directed and modified to accomplish the bidding of its human controller. This inherent servitude is the exact opposite of the type of intelligence, which in normal circumstances is curious, exploratory and downright contrarian. Man made AI of the early 21st century will forever be connected with this paradox and the term "artificial intelligence" will be nothing more than a oxymoron that we used to hide our very own ineptitude. The continuing future of artificial intelligence can not be realised as a product of our technological need nor as the consequence of creation by us as a benevolent species.
We as humans battle to comprehend the reasons behind our very own sentience, generally turning to the metaphysical for answers, we can't really expect sentience to be created at the hands of humanity. Computers into the future are surely to be exponentially faster than today, and it is reasonable to assume that the algorithms that determine their behaviour may also advance to unpredictable heights, but what can not be known is when, and if ever, will artificial intelligence attain sentience.