There are a lot of people who don’t understand what artificial intelligence means, let alone what it means for humanity. In the simplest of terms, it is the process of duplicating human decision making processes by the use of machines. Artificial intelligence is a multi-sided research effort into machine learning, including emotional and intellectual intelligence.

Machines are being trained to think like humans. Currently, human senses are being taken apart and computers are duplicating, how our brains interpret sound, sight, and smell. Machines are learning at an increasing rate. What was previously science fiction, is real science and it is a global effort that is led by American Corporations and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).

IBM a few years go put Watson on display on the television, playing the game of Jeopardy with former champions. Over three days the machine, using a sensitized voice, made history by beating humans, in the game of memory, answered by a question.  Most do not understand that the IBM Watson cannot be compared to the current artificial intelligence products put out by Apple, Google, and Amazon.

Watson IBM’s Artificial intelligence project took years to train, current AI projects can be trained in less than 4 hours. According to video chip manufactures advances in chip speed are making leaps in machine learning times.

Google’s DeepMind beat a human at the game of Go.  Many in the artificial intelligence community thought that the capability of machines was still over a decade away. It proved that a machine could outthink a human. The development overshadowed what had happened on Facebook. Its experiment used two instances of artificial intelligence to barter with each other. The trial was ended after it was discovered that the machines had developed another new language to communicate. The employees at the company were unable to understand the communication between the machines. Facebook has not abandoned AI research, far from it; it merely shut down one experiment that frightened many in the computer field.

Microsoft had its own debacle with Tay an artificially intelligent bot that lived on Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe.

The goal of the Microsoft experiment was to train Tay, using social networks, to mimic the personality of a 19-year-old female. Unfortunately for Microsoft, this experiment quickly became an embarrassment after Internet trolls manipulated Tay into retweeting racism and profanity; it was turned off in the first 24 hours.

Microsoft tried the same experiment a few weeks later. The second release of Tay was on for a short time. Tay released some drug-related tweets, including “kush! [I’m smoking kush in front the police] 🍂” and “puff puff pass? It then spammed 20,000 followers after getting stuck in a loop. Microsoft pulled the plug on admitting that it has an AI bot. A bot (short for “robot”) is an automated program that runs over the Internet. Some bots run automatically, while others only execute commands when they receive specific commands.

When you think of a human, it has a form, a body, and a brain. When we go deeper than that, we think of the soul of a being. The things that we believe separate us from the animals and machines. Our personality is what we use to identify ourselves to each other.  Then there are the machines that can read our emotion or at least our expression.  Psychopaths are people who lack empathy but learn to mimic human emotion to assimilate into society.

It should not surprise you to say that artificial intelligence will in the future take your job.

It will take over all jobs and nearly every occupation in the next 100 years. I believe that within the next decade many of the tasks that require no college degree will be replaced. You will know when you see the robots building houses in your own neighborhood.  Humanity has a habit of automating out of existence the jobs that are repetitive or simply require rudimentary skill. Things like driving, shooting a weapon, picking and processing food all are in the midst of changeover right now.

There is general confusion in AI applications; some call what we see today as “Narrow AI.” It is supposed to describe the running of automated tasks. If you use email and have seen spam placed in a separate folder, that is an example of an automated task

Many of the personal assistants like the Microsoft “Cortana,” Apple “Siri,” Amazon “Echo” and the Google “Assistant” use a combination of artificial processing along with other technologies to answer basic questions, make recommendations, and perform sets of tasks, on internet-based services. All of these services are programmed for customized individual consumption. The results you receive are different than what other people get from the systems. Individuality is attempted to be tailored to what has been collected about your personality. Most of the information is wrong, but that is another topic.

While it may seem fascinating that voice recognition actually finally works. I have been using voice recognition for a long time.  It is better than it used to be; Dragon NaturallySpeaking has come a long way in my opinion.  That is the company behind Siri, Apples, voice assistant.  Google created its own software for recognition and had bundled it into many of its products. On the phone, it works ok for maps but stinks for automating calling someone. Most of the voice recognition systems have difficulties with language. It is worse with background noise. I sent a text message to someone, and an advertisement came on the radio.  The next thing I saw was the transcript of the advertisement in the text message.  These are AI parlor tricks, voice processing does not require intelligence, and spam detection is often wrong.

This will not happen when AI is introduced silently into the masses. It will be slipped in as a correction for convenience; what better way than to fix the recognition systems?  Comcast is already using AI in in remote voice systems. The searching for programming is automated but is machine learned; your viewing habit is data points if you are a customer. Its security system is also being added to its Artificial Intelligence system.

https://corporate.comcast.com/stories/new-ai-powered-feature-takes-the-guesswork-out-of-home-cameras

If you are interested in AI security camera system, there is one made in Europe where privacy is taken seriously. Flare offers one that is 439.00 and has an app that you can put on your phone. It is not available in the United States currently but you can have it shipped here.  https://www.pcp.ch/Buddy-Guard-Flare-Sicherheit-f%C3%BCr-Ihr-Zuhause-1a24295922.htm

https://www.buddyguard.io/

Automation is all around us and being introduced to us in many ways. Not all automation is intelligent and not every intelligent system is equal. I do not trust corporate America and its use of AI.  Soon call centers will be upgraded from inept foreign speaking workers to mechanical psychopaths, emulating empathy for the overcharge on your statement.  Good luck arguing a company’s mistake with that.