ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Name
INF 103: Computer Literacy
Instructor: Bonita Spight-Williams
April 13, 2013

Artificial Intelligence What does our future hold in the area of Artificial Intelligence? “The goal of many computer scientists since the mid–20th century has been to create a computer that could perform logical operations so well that it could actually learn and become sentient or conscious. The effort to achieve this is called artificial intelligence, or AI.” (Bowles, 2010). AI is a branch of computer science that deals with developing machines that solve complex problems in a more human-like manner. This involves computers adopting characteristics of human intelligence. However, it has many associations with other fields of study such as Math, Psychology, Biology, and Philosophy. Many scientists believe that by combining these various fields of study they will ultimately succeed in creating an artificially intelligent machine. A lot of scientists believe that the key to figuring out artificial intelligence is to copy the basic function of the human brain. While it is certainly evident that a computer can acquire knowledge from a program or programmer, it is the new developments in AI that will enable it to apply the knowledge. The new advancements in AI will hopefully enable these machines to not only possess the knowledge, but also understand how to utilize it in a number of situations. Artificial Intelligence researchers analyze human intelligent behavior in an attempt to have computers use the same deductive reasoning skills that humans use. While many of the developments in AI are relatively new the research of AI has been around for many years. One of the first notions of Artificial Intelligence came from Alan Turing (1912-1954) a British mathematician, and logician. Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science. In his 1950 paper “Computing machinery and intelligence”, Turing attempts to outline the rules of his Turing test. The Turing test is a test of a machine’s capability to perform human-like conversation. With the Turing test, he made a significant contribution to the debate regarding synthetic consciousness. The Turing test called for a human judge to engage in a natural language conversation with two parties, one a human and the other a machine. They would all be placed into separate rooms and the questions would be written onto paper. If the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. Turing’s test, however simple, fueled the notion that one day scientist could possibly create computers that would function as human thinking machines. As of now, no computer has been able to pass the Turing test. Scientists have yet to capture all the traits of human intelligence to generate a completely artificially intelligent machine, however they are getting closer. In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue computer beat the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. The computer could evaluate chess positions rapidly to make the most strategic move. Deep Blue could win a game of chess but it could tell us the strategy it used and it was limited to only playing chess unlike humans that can learn to play many different games. (Norvig, 2012)
In 2005 IBM developed a computer that they named Watson, after IBM’s first president. The Watson system was built by a team of IBM scientists whose goal was to create a standalone platform that could rival a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language.”(Kroeker, 2011) Watson went on to compete on the game show “Jeopardy” in 2011 and defeated two human grand champions. The next projects that Watson will be used for is healthcare and banking. It will be used by healthcare to suggest treatment options and in the banking industry to help improve the banking experience. In order to accomplish this it has do two things that machines have never been able to do. “First off, there’s natural language processing. That means figuring out what the question actually is. Then there’s machine learning: understanding what facts are important for which question. In others words, you give Watson questions, it gives you answers.”(McMillan, 2012) With the development of Watson and all the potential applications for it the future of artificial intelligence is getting closer to human-like intelligence every day. Trends in AI development over the past few years have emerged based on the state of mind of influential researchers, funding opportunities, and available computer hardware. These types of influence may direct AI research into a more controlled pattern. One example of Artificial Intelligence is voice recognition. Voice recognition or natural language processing involves building a system that understands and speaks human language almost like a human. This application of AI has a very commercial appeal for use in business and industry and is in wide spread use today. The potential applications of Artificial Intelligence are abundant. They stretch from the military for independent control and target identification, to the entertainment industry for computer games and robotic pets. Hospitals, banks, and insurance companies that handle large amounts of information can use AI to predict customer behavior and detect trends. There is no doubt among the scientific community that artificial machines will be capable of greater human-like intelligence in near future. As artificial intelligence progresses so does the category of robotics. A good example of these types of machines is the robots that are being created in Japan. They look human, mimic the movements of the people that are in front of them, and even blink their eyes. For a majority of the public this causes an uneasy feeling which is known as uncanny valley. “Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori put forward the hypothesis that human like objects like certain kinds of robots elicit emotional responses similar to real humans proportionate to their degree of human likeness. Yet, if a certain degree of similarity is reached emotional responses become all of a sudden very repulsive.”(Misslehorn, 2009). A majority of the population have a fear of these types of machines due to the fact that they believe they will inevitably take over the earth, which is completely unfounded. As of now, no robot has anything remotely close to human-like intelligence, but as artificial intelligence and robotics continue to evolve the differences between robot and human will become less noticeable. AI is a branch of computer science that deals with developing machines that solve complex problems in a more human-like manner, so why not make them look more human-like? The possibilities are endless.

References
Bowles, M. D. (2010). Introduction to computer literacy. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc.
Crevier, Daniel (1993), AI: The Tumultuous Search for Artificial Intelligence, New York, NY: BasicBooks
Kroeker, K. L. (2011). Weighing Watson's Impact. Communications Of The ACM, 54(7), 13-15. doi:10.1145/1965724.1965730
McMillan, R. (2012), IBM Sends Jeopardy supercomputer to medical school, Wired Enterprise, Retrieved from: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/03/ibm-watson/
Norvig, P. (2012). ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. New Scientist, 216(2889), i-8.
Misselhorn, C. (2009). Empathy with Inanimate Objects and the Uncanny Valley. Minds & Machines, 19(3), 345-359. doi:10.1007/s11023-009-9158-2
Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59433-460. doi:10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433
Wakeman, Nick (2011-02-17), IBM’S Watson heads to Medical School, Washington Technology. Retrieved from http://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2011/02/17/ibm-watson-next-steps.aspx