Thinking Machines: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence and Where It’s Taking Us Next

209 Pages·2017·1.55 MB·English

by  Luke Dormehl

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L C C - -P D
IBRARYOF ONGRESS ATALOGING IN UBLICATION ATA
Names: Dormehl, Luke, author.
Title: Thinking machines : the quest for artificial intelligence—and where it’s taking us next / Luke
Dormehl.
Description: New York : TarcherPerigee, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016044018 (print) | LCCN 2016049722 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143130581 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781524704414 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Artificial intelligence. | Artificial intelligence—Social aspects. | BISAC: COMPUTERS
/Intelligence (Al) & Semantics. | SCIENCE/Philosophy & Social Aspects. | TECHNOLOGY &
ENGINEERING / History.
Classification: LCC TA347.A78 D67 2017 (print) | LCC TA347.A78 (ebook) | DDC 006.309—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016044018
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Cover design: Will Staehle
Cover image: VLADGRIN/Shutterstock
Version_1
To my pal
Alex Millington
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: Thinking Machines
1 Whatever Happened to Good Old-Fashioned AI?
2 Another Way to Build AI
3 Intelligence Is All Around Us
4 How May I Serve You?
5 How AI Put Our Jobs in Jeopardy
6 Can AI Be Creative?
7 In the Future There Will Be Mindclones
8 The Future (Risks) of Thinking Machines
Conclusion: Rise of the Robots
Author Interviews
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
Thinking Machines
THE ALL-SEEING RED eye stares, unblinking. The computer speaks calmly.
“Hello,” it says. “Shall we continue the game?”
It is referring to a game of chess you started with it earlier that day. But
you’re not really in the mood to play. It’s not that the computer almost always
beats you at chess (although it does). Instead, you’re annoyed because it made an
inexplicable error concerning the supposed failure of vital bits of important
machinery, necessary to ensure your continued survival. No biggie. You checked
them out in person and found them to still be in good working order, although
the computer insisted they were broken. Now you want answers.
“Yes, I know that you found them to be functional, but I can assure you that
they were about to fail,” the machine says, trying to placate you in the same
emotionless monotone it always uses.
You can feel your blood boiling.
“Well, that’s just not the case,” you splutter. “The components are perfectly
all right. We tested them under 100 percent overload conditions.”
“I’m not questioning your word, but it’s just not possible,” the computer
says.
It then adds the six words you know to be true, but are absolutely the last
thing you want to hear right now: “I’m not capable of being wrong.”
—
Movie buffs will instantly recognize this scene from Stanley Kubrick’s classic
sci-fi film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, about a sentient computer that turns
murderous and begins attempting to kill off its crew.
For years, this was the way we thought about Artificial Intelligence: as a
faintly threatening presence safely shrouded in the context of science fiction.
No more.
Today, the dream of AI has stepped out of cinemas and paperback novels and
into reality. Artificial Intelligence can drive cars, trade stocks and shares, learn
to carry out complex skills simply by watching YouTube videos, translate across
dozens of different languages, recognize human faces with more accuracy than
we can, and create original hypotheses to help discover new drugs for curing
disease. That’s just the beginning.
Thinking Machines is a book about this journey—and what it means for all of
us. En route, we will meet computers pretending to trap pedophiles, dancing
robot vacuum cleaners, chess-playing algorithms, and uploaded consciousnesses
designed to speak to you from beyond the grave. This is the story of how we
imagine our future, and how in a world obsessed with technology, we carve out a
role for humanity in the face of accelerating computer intelligence. It’s about the
nature of creativity, the future of employment, and what happens when all
knowledge is data and can be stored electronically. It’s about what we’re trying
to do when we make machines smarter than we are, how humans still have the
edge (for now), and the question of whether you and I aren’t thinking machines
of a sort as well.
The pioneering British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing
predicted in 1950 that by the end of the twentieth century, “the use of words and
general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak
of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”
Like many futurist predictions about technology, he was optimistic in his
timeline—although he wasn’t off by too much. In the early part of the twenty-
first century, we routinely talk about “smart” connected technologies and
machine “learning”—concepts that would have seemed bizarre to many people
in Turing’s day.
Now celebrating its sixtieth year as a discipline, Artificial Intelligence is
cementing itself as one of mankind’s biggest and most ambitious projects: a
struggle to build real thinking machines. Technologists are getting closer by the
day, and a glimmering tomorrow is fast coming into focus on the horizon.
Thinking Machines is about this dazzling (near) future, the changes that lurk
just around the corner, and how they will transform our lives forever.
1
Whatever Happened to Good Old-Fashioned AI?
IT WAS THE first thing people saw as they drew close: a shining, stainless steel
globe called the Unisphere, rising a full twelve stories into the air. Around it
stood dozens of fountains, jetting streams of crystal-clear water into the skies of
Flushing Meadows Corona Park, in New York’s Queens borough. At various
times during the day, a performer wearing a rocket outfit developed by the US
military jetted past the giant globe—showing off man’s ability to rise above any
and all challenges.
The year was 1964 and the site, the New York World’s Fair. During the
course of the World’s Fair, an estimated 52 million people descended upon
Flushing Meadows’ 650 acres of pavilions and public spaces. It was a
celebration of a bright present for the United States and a tantalizing glimpse of
an even brighter future: one covered with multilane motorways, glittering
skyscrapers, moving pavements and underwater communities. Even the
possibility of holiday resorts in space didn’t seem out of reach for a country like
the United States, which just five years later would successfully send man to the
Moon. New York City’s “Master Builder” Robert Moses referred to the 1964
World’s Fair as “the Olympics of Progress.”
Wherever you looked there was some reminder of America’s post-war global
dominance. The Ford Motor Company chose the World’s Fair to unveil its latest
automobile, the Ford Mustang, which rapidly became one of history’s best-
selling cars. New York’s Sinclair Oil Corporation exhibited “Dinoland,” an
animatronic recreation of the Mesozoic age, in which Sinclair Oil’s brontosaurus
corporate mascot towered over every other prehistoric beast. At the NASA
pavilion, fairgoers had the chance to glimpse a fifty-one-foot replica of the
Saturn V rocket ship boat-tail, soon to help the Apollo space missions reach the
stars. At the Port Authority Building, people lined up to see architects’ models of
the spectacular “Twin Towers” of the World Trade Center, which was set to
break ground two years later in 1966.
Today, many of these advances evoke a nostalgic sense of technological
progress. In all their “bigger, taller, heavier” grandeur, they speak to the final
days of an age that was, unbeknownst to attendees of the fair, coming to a close.
The Age of Industry was on its way out, to be superseded by the personal
computer–driven Age of Information. For those children born in 1964 and after,
digits would replace rivets in their engineering dreams. Apple’s Steve Jobs was
only nine years old at the time of the New York World’s Fair. Google’s
cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, would not be born for close to another
decade; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for another ten years after that.
As it turned out, the most forward-looking section of Flushing Meadows
Corona Park turned out to be the exhibit belonging to International Business
Machines Corporation, better known as IBM. IBM’s mission for the 1964
World’s Fair was to cement computers (and more specifically Artificial
Intelligence) in the public consciousness, alongside better-known wonders like
space rockets and nuclear reactors. To this end, the company selected the fair as
the venue to introduce its new System/360 series of computer mainframes:
machines supposedly powerful enough to build the first prototype for a sentient
computer.
IBM’s centerpiece at the World’s Fair was a giant, egg-shaped pavilion,
designed by the celebrated husband and wife team of Charles and Ray Eames.
The size of a blimp, the egg was erected on a forest of forty-five stylized, thirty-
two-foot-tall sheet metal trees; a total of 14,000 gray and green Plexiglas leaves
fanning out to create a sizable, one-acre canopy. Reachable only via a specially
installed hydraulic lift, the egg welcomed in excited fair attendees so that they
could sit in a high-tech screening room and watch a video on the future of
Artificial Intelligence. “See it, THINK, and marvel at the mind of man and his
machine,” wrote one giddy reviewer, borrowing the “Think” tagline that had
been IBM’s since the 1920s.
IBM showed off several impressive technologies at the event. One was a
groundbreaking handwriting recognition computer, which the official fair
brochure referred to as an “Optical Scanning and Information Retrieval” system.
This demo allowed visitors to write an historical date of their choosing (post-
1851) in their own handwriting on a small card. That card was then fed into an