Doraemon, The Age of AI, and The Art of Helping
22nd Century. Sewashi, great-great grandson of Nobita, watches Nobita tackling with his problems, figuring out how to fit in his friend circle, trying to overcome the burden of his laziness and procrastination which miserably affects his ability to score good marks-or rather-not to score bad marks. But unlike Nobita, Sewashi is pretty good in math and science. He knows in his heart that given Nobita’s rate of adding up his negligience & frustration along with his pile of problems, his failure is sure-shot and his future is doomed(and without his one true love, Shizuka).
Sensing this, Sewashi decides to send his cat-like appearing robot named Doraemon back through the timeline(or, actually present!?) in 21st Century to circumvent for the bad future and turning it into a good future. Nobita understands his great-great grandson’s ulterior motive and accepts Doraemon as his friend while still figuring out what it actually is! Over the period, they both get along and share a deep bond of friendship. Doraemon, being both technically and emotionally intelligent, picks out from his pool of gadgets and solves all the problems Nobita faces . With Doraemon by his side providing him moral and emotional support, Nobita becomes a better person.
With all his problem-solving, good-serving, burden-lifting, obstacle-ridding empathetic expertise, Doraemon truly is a paragon of “If robots are built to solve human problems and to minimize human efforts, here’s how it should be”. But is there really a robot like Doraemon in our world? Could we really make a robot that communicates fluently with humans? Could we actually, in that robot, infuse emotions along with the information? Would the robot be able to make decisions on its own as humans do? Can machines think rationally and humanly? Can machines ‘act’ rationally and humanly? Cordially inviting you to The Age of AI.
The Age of AI
The major breakthrough in the history of exploration and reveleation of whether it’s machinely-possible to be able to think like a human was done by Alan Turing, the father of AI as we now call him( Actually, John McCarthy is also the father of AI but it would be inappropriate to say AI has two fathers. Idk! Choose yourself). In his self-named Turing Test, he proposed that a computer can be said to possess artificial intelligence if it can mimic human responses under specific conditions. But the only glossed-over problem in this test was, it was too specific and limited to only certain simulations. It eventually became controversial and criticised over the years, but you have to give something to Turing right?
Nevertheless, we have come a long way since that time and over the past 10 years or so, AI has become, what Andrew Ng likes to coin, “the new electricity”.
Arificial Intelligence( AI for short) is the field of embedding human thinking into computers.
The machines are set to make decisions on their own based on the past experiences. Just like we were babies, we had to be told “This is a cat” by pointing out at the cat, “This is how you respond to a question” by self-enacting the answer. Machines are also given the information so that they can later identify the thing that it had been trained to identify. This is why it’s ‘Artificial’.
Humans are receptivity experts. It’s a fact that our decision at the moment is not just a reponse of our brain, but all the receptions of past experiences stored in our brain eventually which manifest in that decision. Likewise, the more past information that we provide to the machine, the more ‘data’ you feed in, the more accurate it’s predictions will be. It’s for this fact that today, the deep neural nets are fed with gazillions of data to classify, identify and predict information of use to businesses. Today, every major industry is incorporating AI in it’s systems to increase it’s revenues, building consumer-centric solutions, filtering traffic, recommending products-per-taste among many other services. From detecting the presence of cancer tissues, predicting which combinations of drugs will be most effective for each patient, self-driving cars incorporating tracking, lane-changing and navigation, investing by accurately comparing between stocks and identifying which stocks to trade in, mass surveillance by facial recognition, threat detection, robots serving in hospitals to reduce staff load, AI is actively helping humans where it would be difficult for them to operate.
If anything, our Doraemon had to be an AI-driven robocat that makes his friends life easy.
Emotion: An instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge.
We humans are emotional beings. We feel for each other. We have empathy for each other. And we help each other in difficult times out of that empathy. Throughout history, people have helped each other to build a society which shares a sense of belongingness. Early men used to deploy at the periphery to protect their loved ones-their clan from the danger. While, women would built the life inside and provided care. Countries help other countries in the moment of calamity by providing supplies. This whole world structure stands upon the mutual assistance of people, governments, religions and nations. We have mastered the ‘Art of Helping’.
The question here is that besides all the logical, reasoning, cognitive, knowledge based information, could we also infuse robots with emotions? Could we teach robots how to feel, how to help in danger? Well, Doraemon can do all that but the problem is, such a robot doesn’t exist(atleast yet) in the real world. But again, you never know how fast an imagination turns into reality! Right?
