Quick: What do you think of when you hear the words “artificial intelligence?” You might think of Siri or Alexa. Maybe you picture robots that are coming to steal your job. Or perhaps you think of technology that turns against its inventors and spells the end of the human race.
Whatever your personal stance may be, according to recent headlines, the population is split when it comes to their belief in AI. Some individuals think the premise of it is over-hyped, while others think that you shouldn’t underestimate its significance.
So who’s right and who’s wrong? For now, there is no clear answer. However, AI isn’t just something that’s going to happen in the future. It’s happening now. With numerous approaches to advancing the field, AI is sure to impact our lives in some way. In fact, it can already complete many tasks better than humans can. Don’t worry, though. In its current forms, it won’t make your life seem like a science fiction film overnight or take your job away.
While you’re probably familiar with the high-profile milestones achieved in this category, you most likely haven’t heard them all. Some may even surprise you. With that intent, we’ve put together this list of the most impressive things that AI can already do better than humans.
Let’s start with the AI win that just about everybody has heard about. IBM’s Watson computer winning Jeopardy!in 2011. According to TechRepublic, Watson won the game show with $77,147, leaving human champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings in the dust with $21,600 and $24,000, respectively.
As Steve Lohr reports for the New York Times, the triumph seemed to suggest “limitless horizons for artificial intelligence.” But as illustrated by IBM’s struggles to convert Watson from science project to a commercial technology, progress in AI “typically comes in short steps rather than giant leaps.”
Another game at which AI has bested human champions? The complex board game Go.
Joon Ian Wong and Nikhil Sonnad report that AlphaGo — an artificially intelligent player developed by Google DeepMind in London — didn’t only effectively win the game. They said it also “came up with entirely new ways of approaching a game that originated in China two or three millennia ago and has been played obsessively since then.”
Lee Sedol, one of the world’s best and most experienced Go players, lost the first three games in AlphaGo. And he won the fourth one only because he adopted “some of AlphaGo’s strategy by pursuing less expected and riskier maneuvers that proved successful in the end,” he says. This episode, according to Quartz, illustrates that “the true value of artificial intelligence reaches far beyond the simplistic narrative of man versus machine. Instead, AI’s potential may be in teaching humans new ways of thinking for ourselves.”
It’s not just game shows and board games that AI can beat you at, though. Elizabeth Lopatto reports for The Verge that Google’s DeepMind can also learn to play video games. Specifically, it taught itself to play dozens of Atari games. Out of 49 Atari games, AI performed better in 43 games than previous technologies, and better than humans in 29 games.
So what’s the big deal? These are pretty simple video games to maneuver, after all. Well, they’re a better model of real world chaos than the games that previous computers have mastered, like chess, for example. And as Nicola Twilley points out in The New Yorker, chess has an “extremely limited ‘feature space.'” All a computer needs to consider is the positions of the pieces on the board during its hundreds of turns. But an Atari game has much more information and hundreds of thousands of turns. “In this sense, a game like Crazy Climber is a closer analogue to the real world than chess is, and in the real world humans still have the edge,” Twilley states.
Recently, AI is besting humans at poker.
