Since some of you showed interest in AI – I am putting a few words here with more to come when we will get to this topic. I actually have a course “Intelligent IS” where students not only learn the theory of various types of AI (from neural networks to genetic algorithms, fuzzy-logic systems, etc.) but also do some hands-on labs on each of these types with a an expert system as a term project.
In my over 30 years of IS experience (I an not only teaching the stuff :) I saw a growing demand in intelligent IS since controlling very complex modern systems is almost impossible. They should be able to learn, adapt, and survive on their own. Like when you do gardening – you do not control every cell in every plant, but rather rely on their own intelligence and self-organization, just providing necessary CARE. For this section of the week an important message about artificial intelligence is in understanding that modern IS get more and more complicated (you probably felt it already in our labs :) to the point of hitting the limitations of complexity.
Modern economy has to grow and it cannot use more and more resources as before, as in primitive economic models of growth. But if the complexity of IS, as they are built now, is limited – it puts limits on economic development, which is deeply depending on IS to control such expansion and growing connectivity (topic of the next week).
A few years ago IBM and some other top developers issued SOS asking researchers to spend efforts in taming complexity of modern systems, since it can choke economy and well-being of mankind. Artificial intelligence is the only domain capable of dealing with this task. The problem is that you cannot really control AI and just have to trust its learning (yes these systems learn and soon know much more than their creators) and judgment (like AI used on military drones deciding who to kill).
I find the concept of AI very interesting - I wonder when AI will become smarter than billions of human brains combined and if it is the lagging of software behind hardware that is holding back advancement.
ReplyDeleteThis is scary! Why do humans dig a whole for themselves? We've come to a point where we as humans will have no choice but to depend on AI to survive as a community. I wonder it's impact on the environment and non-human living things.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, the time of my post is 5:53 AM not 2:53 AM.
ReplyDeletewould say that it is hardware that is lagging since the more parallel computations can be done - the better. But in general - there are no limits to AI growth since there are such forms as swarm intelligence and multi-agent systems where it grows with the number of small swarming agents (like ants) and its is just copy/past to create a new one. Speaking of comparison with human intelligence - AI already can beat the champion of the world in chess...
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of how scary it is to let AI instead of humans make decisions - this is already happening on a very large scale and people are just not aware of it. On the other hand letting people make decisions might be not less scary for various reasons.