Artificial intelligence already plays a major role in human economies and societies and it will play an even bigger role in the coming years. To ponder the future of artificial intelligence is thus to acknowledge that the future is artificial intelligence.
This will be partly owing to advances in “deep learning,” which uses multilayer neural networks that were first theorized in the 1980s. With today’s greater computing power and storage, deep learning is now a practical possibility, and a deep-learning application gained worldwide attention in 2016 by beating the world champion in Go. Commercial enterprises and governments alike hope to adapt the technology to find useful patterns in “Big Data” of all kinds.
In 2011, IBM’s Watson marked another artificial intelligence watershed, by beating two previous champions in Jeopardy!, a game that combines general knowledge with lateral thinking. And yet another significant development is the emerging “Internet of Things,” which will continue to grow as more gadgets, home appliances, wearable devices and publicly-sited sensors become connected and begin to broadcast messages around the clock. Big Brother will not be watching you; but a trillion little brothers might be.
Beyond these innovations, we can expect to see countless more examples of what were once called “expert systems”: Artificial intelligence applications that aid, or even replace, human professionals in various specialties. Similarly, robots will be able to perform tasks that could not be automated before. Already, robots can carry out virtually every role that humans once filled on a warehouse floor.
Given this trend, it is not surprising that some people foresee a point known as the “Singularity,” when artificial intelligence systems will exceed human intelligence, by intelligently improving themselves. At that point, whether it is in 2030 or at the end of this century, the robots will truly have taken over, and artificial intelligence will consign war, poverty and disease to the past.
To all of this, I say: Dream on. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is still a pipe dream. It is simply too difficult to master. And while it may be achieved one of these days, it is certainly not in our foreseeable future.
But there are still major developments on the horizon, many of which will give us hope for the future. For example, artificial intelligence can make reliable legal advice available to more people, and at a very low cost. And it can help us tackle currently incurable diseases and expand access to credible medical advice, without requiring additional medical specialists.
In other areas, we should be prudently pessimistic — not to say dystopian — about the future. Artificial intelligence has worrying implications for the military, individual privacy and employment. Automated weapons already exist, and they could eventually be capable of autonomous target selection.
