Too futuristic? A recipe for financial disaster? Not so, says Nick Jennings, a software engineer at Mobile VCE. Mobile VCE is a consortium of some of the world’s top consumer electronic firms, mobile networks and broadcasters (including Nokia, Sony, Vodafone and the BBC), and is funding the development of just such a cell phone.
“They start off monitoring what you do and gradually look for ways to increase their role. Over time they get to know your preferences,” says Jennings. At first they will seek your approval before spending the money. The consortium hopes that this will ease consumers over the psychological barrier of giving control over personal finances to a piece of electronics. Eventually, they speculate, consumers will begin to find the continuous approval process tedious and will authorise the cell phone to act on it’s own.
The technology is at least to some extent already in use, they say. “We already see simple aspects of this behaviour in places like the eBay website, where software agents are deciding what to bid and when to bid,” Jennings says. “It just depends upon how much autonomy you want to give them.” So far Mobile VCE has only tested this technology on palmtop computers with built-in cell phones, but soon they will be sold as part of an ordinary third generation phone.
This is a prime example of how artificial intelligence (AI) processes are creeping closer to the average person’s personal life. Already AI techniques are being applied in fields like medicine, drug design, e-commerce and e-governance, and everyone knows the machines can already beat the best that humanity has to offer in chess. But we haven’t even scratched the surface yet. Across the world, the brightest minds of our time are conceptualising new applications and refinements to current AI technology.
Daniela Rus is one such a mind, and one with a strongly developed social conscience at that. Rus’s concepts all share a common purpose – to serve humankind. One such concept involves collars for livestock, hooked up to Global Positioning System technology. The activated collar will bark like a dog when the sheep or cow reaches the end of a field, sending it loping back and rendering old-fashioned fences obsolete. “Agriculture is an area that has not received enough attention from people working in high tech,” says Rus. “It’s what feeds us, so I think it’s our duty to contribute and see if we can help that sector out.”
Rus also envisages selfrecon-figuring robots that will be able to alter their shape at will. In the case of a mine disaster, for example, that has caused people to be trapped under ground, such a segmented robot would assume a snake-like shape that would enable it to easily slither down very narrow passages on its way to the trapped survivors. The robot would reconfigure itself, with segments climbing over one another through the use of magnets and grippers. Once it reaches the trapped survivors, it would reshape itself, pry open an escape route and act as scaffolding to ensure an easy rescue.
For Rus, research into AI “means to study life, to get an under-standing of how we’re made up. Understanding life is a great and noble quest, because that’s how we understand ourselves.” Of a possible AI threat to humanity, as trotted out by Hollywood, she has this to say; “ We’re a very adaptive species. If something happens and we’re not happy with it, we fix it. So I have great faith in the human species, that the right thing will happen.”
Her positive outlook on the morality of humankind is both denied and confirmed (depending on your point of view) by the story of the Norns. Norns are artificial life forms created by Stephen Grand and turned into a best selling game called Creatures. The Norns come complete with their own digital DNA, biochemistry and ability to evolve. “Probably the most monstrous thing is this guy called Anti norn,” says Grand. “I think he is a US Marine. He has a website devoted to torturing the creatures. In response, people put up rescue centres and adoption agencies for these poor battered creatures.” It seems not everyone on Planet Earth is wholesome, even as this presents evidence of the soft hearts out there.
“The first time I really knew I was successful was when someone sent me an ill Norn by e-mail and asked me to cure it,” Grand relates. “The problem was it just stood there, and they were worried because it was wasting away. I discovered that it was deaf and blind because a gene hadn’t been expressed. It couldn’t see or hear the world, so it wasn’t responding. I persuaded the gene to wake up, cured it, taught it some swear words, then sent it back to Australia. They sent me a Christmas card to say it was doing fine. Afterwards I wondered who was the idiot – them for worrying about a data file or me for spending a day trying to cure it?”
As for the Hollywood-induced fear of AI taking over the planet, Grad says simply: “There are millions of species on this planet and I see no reason to fear yet another species.” But exactly how far are we from the point where machines can be termed a species? This is a thorny problem hotly debated by AI engineers and philosophers alike. On one point there seems to be consensus: for something to be termed ‘alive’ it needs to have consciousness, some sort of self-awareness, imagination, an ability for higher level thought processes.
“There’s much more to intelligence than logic,” continues Grand. “Most of the AI pioneers were mathematical magicians and philosophers, and to them thinking was about logic, about reason. But most intelligence is not logical. Dogs tend not to argue about syllogisms, but they still seem bright. Chuck IBM’s Deep Blue chess computer and a dog into a pond, and see which one climbs out first. Which means that intelligence is grounded in survival. If you haven’t got a reason to think you won’t think, and survival is what motivates us.”
In some respects AI has already advanced far beyond human ability, for example in handling large amounts of information. But speed, as with size, isn’t everything. Currently, the world’s most powerful computer is NEC’s Earth Simulator in Japan. Earth Simulator is capable of carrying out 100 trillion operations per second. This, it is believed, merely approaches the processing power of the human brain. Of course, on the playing field of super computers the goal posts are constantly moving. In 2002 IBM won a $290 million government contract to build what is expected to be the world’s two fastest computers. One, ASCI Purple, will be used for nuclear research. The other, Blue Gene, will be the more powerful of the two and will be used for civilian research, more specifically into protein folding sequences. These supercomputers are scheduled for completion by the end of this year and next respectively.
Maybe not as powerful by any means but a whole lot cuter, is NeCoRo, the robot cat. On sale since 2002 and currently priced at 185 000 yen, NeCoRo represents a giant evolutionary leap for felines everywhere as it not only recognises and responds to its name, but also adjusts its personality to that of its owner. For a whopping $1 599 you could opt for Aibo, the dog of steel, whom you could ‘raise’ from puppy to adulthood. Aibo understands more than one hundred words and has the ability to self-charge on his recharge station.
It seems that there is very little in between the super computers and the robo-pets currently, but you can be sure that the technology is indeed finding its way into our homes and our personal lives in our quest for easier and more efficient lives. In this respect, maybe humans are becoming more like machines... Still, the one thing that sets us apart from the tin men is consciousness. We are unlikely to find a way to transfer or create consciousness any time soon, as it is an aspect of ourselves that we still have little understanding of. Maybe before we continue on our quest for artificial intelligence we should turn the microscope once more on ourselves, this time on our souls.