How Far Are We From Artificial Intelligence?

A sophisticated artificial intelligence is a long way away, but in the meantime we can certainly find ways to get clever robots to make life easier.
Siri, Apple’s robotic helper, is getting smarter. Until now he or she has often been unintentionally funny rather than useful, but that’s apparently set to change with the new “proactive” assistant features of iOS9. New skills include things like setting reminders and opening the music screen the moment you plug in your headphones, but even more interesting is a Siri that will be detecting when you get in your car, or one  which will search your emails when an unknown number is calling to let you know who it is.
Siri is becoming a clever piece of anticipatory computing, but it doesn’t actually exhibit true artificial intelligence (AI). “[AI] could refer to just getting machines to do things that seem intelligent on the surface, such as playing chess. […] But if you mean a machine that has real intelligence, that is thinking that’s inaccurate,” Douglas Hofstadter, cognitive scientist at Indiana University, told Popular Mechanics. In order to create true AI, said Hofstadter, we need to ask deeper questions: “What is understanding? How do we make links between things that are, on the surface, fantastically different from one another?”.
One prominent investor in AI is Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, but he told MIT students this is more to “keep an eye on what’s going on” than any real expectation of getting results. In fact, it seems Musk would rather we avoided the issue altogether: “With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.”. Alongside Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and actor Ashton Kutcher, Musk is in any case an investor in Vicarious, a company working on building a thinking computer. The goal is to create a neural network which can replicate the part of the brain in charge of vision, body movement and language.
A more down-to-earth ambition can be found at Imperial College London where British inventor James Dyson has invested in a £5m robotics lab. “My generation believed the world would be overrun by robots by the year 2014,” Dyson told BBC News. “We now have the mechanical and electronic capabilities, but robots still lack understanding – seeing and thinking in the way we do. Mastering this will make our lives easier and lead to previously unthinkable technologies.”.
Machine learning has improved quality of life for Professor Stephen Hawking, who last year started using a new communication system developed by Intel, with help from British company Swiftkey. The Swiftkey technology works by learning how the professor thinks, suggesting the words he might want to use next. Nevertheless, Hawking is concerned about what a sophisticated artificial brain could do: “It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate,” he told BBC News. “Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”.
Whether or not Hawking is right, we are a long way away from this kind of advanced AI. The Dyson Robotics Laboratory is currently working on getting robots to handle an unpredictable environment, because so far robots can only really do what they’re told, and one thing at a time. It’s the skills we learn as children which are the hardest to teach robots – it took researchers at the University of Berkeley a year to teach a robot to fold a towel. So it’s safe to say we’re a long way from having electronic kitchen helpers, let alone any kind of Matrix scenario looming in our lifetimes.
What do you think? Will AI shape our lives for the better or worse? Let us know @VPSNET.