28/01/2021
We live in exciting times. Our relationships with machines, objects and things are quickly changing. Since mankind lived in caves, we have pushed our will into passive tools with our hands and our voices. Our mice and our keyboards do exactly as we tell them to, and devices like the Amazon Echo can help us do simple tasks, like turning on lights, or more complex tasks, like responding to questions with analytics.
But with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), the tides might turn. Current AI systems are trained to perform a human task in a clever, computerized way, but they are trained to do one task – and one task alone. The system that can play Go cannot play solitaire or poker, and it will not acquire skills to do so. The software that drives an autonomous vehicle cannot operate the lights in your home.
This does not mean that this form of AI is not powerful. It has the potential to transform many industries – maybe every industry. But we should not get ahead of ourselves in terms of what can be accomplished. Systems that learn in a supervised, top-down fashion based on training data cannot grow beyond the contents of the data; they cannot create or innovate or reason.