Artificial Intelligence began as a philosophical conundrum in ancient times, developed into a science fiction forecast (and warning) in the Modern Era and is a practical reality today. This shows that from the earliest known period of human history to the present day it has been a subject of interest to some of the brightest minds and powerful personalities. Here’s a run-down of some of the most insightful, important or accurate things which have been said:
Alan Turing was a pioneer in bringing AI from the realm of philosophical prediction to reality. He realized in the 1950s it would need greater understanding of human intelligence before we could hope to build machines which would “think” like us.
“I believe that at the end of the 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.” (1950)
But he was also aware of the dangers.
“It seems probable that once the machine thinking method has started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.”
Shortly after, in 1956, computer scientist John McCarthy instigated the Dartmouth Conference, an organized event aimed at moving forward serious scientific development of AI. His proposal summed up concepts that have formed the basis for academic study of AI ever since.
“The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.”
Jeff Hawkins, who founded Palm, also studied neuroscience and came to understand that a fuller understanding of the human brain needed to be achieved before AI would become useful.
“AI scientists tried to program computers to act like humans without first understanding what intelligence is and what it means to understand. They left out the most important part of building intelligent machines, the intelligence … before we attempt to build intelligent machines we have to first understand how the brain things, and there is nothing artificial about that.”
Former US president Barrack Obama understands the difference between specialized and generalized AI:
“We’ve been seeing specialized AI in every aspect of our lives, from medicine and transportation to how electricity is distributed, and it promises to create a vastly more productive and efficient economy … But it also has some downsides that we’re gonna have to figure out in terms of not eliminating jobs. It could increase inequality. It could suppress wages.”
While Vladimir Putin – The Russian president sees AI as a key to unlock power.
“Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russian, but for all of humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”
Others such as physicist Stephen Hawking have felt that warnings are what are needed most.
“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race … it would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”
And he is not alone. Entrepreneur and technologist Elon Musk, though a keen investor in AI technology, believes:
“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, I’d probably say that. So we need to be very careful.”
Others are more optimistic – such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg who has publicly disagreed with Musk’s statements.
“Whenever I hear people saying AI is going to hurt people in the future I think, yeah, technology can generally always be used for good and bad and you need to be careful about how you build it … if you’re arguing against AI then you’re arguing against safer cars that aren’t going to have accidents, and you’re arguing against being able to better diagnose people when they’re sick.”
His colleague at Facebook, Yan Lecun, director of AI research, explains that unsupervised learning – teaching machines to learn for themselves without having to be explicitly told if everything they do is right or wrong – is the key to “true” AI.
“Most of human and animal learning is unsupervised learning. If intelligence was a cake, unsupervised learning would be the cake, supervised learning would be the icing on the cake, and reinforcement learning would be the cherry on the cake. We know how to make the icing and the cherry, but we don’t know how to make the cake. We need to solve the unsupervised learning problem before we can even think of getting to true AI.”
Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page knew that Google’s ultimate goal would be AI even when most people thought of it as simply a search engine.
“Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted and it would give you the right thing. We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we’re working on.” – Larry Page, 2000.
“If you had all of the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” – Sergey Brin, 2004.
