What has the power to think but doesn’t have a mind of it’s own?
The Future of A.I.
Plinko is a popular board game that debuted on The Price is Right in January 1983. Contestants climb up the stairs, and slide chips down the Plinko board. The chips bounce around, in the end falls on some numbers, and contestants win money.
The Plinko board has lights but no computer. Somehow it still has intelligence built into the design. And what’s the biggest fear people have of artificial intelligence?
Rise of the Plinko Boards
The five parts of intelligence behind the Plinko board are:
- Board
- Rods
- Chip
- Cash Prize
- Player
What are the odds a group of Plinko boards rise up against society? None. The future of artificial intelligence will be secured with the Plinko board method. To ensure gadgets remain secure and don’t go rogue on us, automated devices, vehicles, appliances, homes all will have a foundation that looks like a Plinko board.
Boards
The board is where interactions occur. This includes real world, virtual world, digital world, and everything between. We as a society have been infusing with virtual versions of ourselves over the past few decades. As intelligence gets more powerful, we will be surrounded by intelligent things smarter than us. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates have warned humanity about the dangers of artificial intelligence.
Musk earlier this week revealed plans for NueraLink, a company whose job it will be to use nanotechnology to enhance the human brain.
It is evident that the world’s smartest and most technologically advanced people are working towards human and computer integration. The board is expanding around us. In the early 1900’s, the board included the physical world and telephony. Fast forward to 2000’s, the board includes the physical world, smart phones, internet, VR, and now AR. With more apps and more gadgets coming into existence, these worlds are infinite in potential, and now starting to cross over into each other.
Boards are all the devices and apps you connect with to form a digital identity. People can have one or many, and how they interact with each other is entire up to you.
Rods
The rods are parameters and regulators. They keep the chip from sliding straight down or off the board. Without rods in place, the chances of winning a cash prizes goes down. The object of Plinko is to win money. The makers who design our future with technology, will need rods to keep the game going.
When Alan Turing designed the Turing Test to test “Machine Intelligence,” he started out by asking “Can machines think?”
Realizing he didn’t want to define machine or intelligence, he rephrased that to “Can machines do what we can do?” He was testing the physical and intellectual capacities of man not the machine. He designed a machine to play chess to test a machine’s “thinking” ability. It was essentially calculating probabilities faster than a human could. While it was capable of thinking, it didn’t have a mind of it’s own. It couldn’t change the game to checkers or flip the board if it’s losing. He was testing the human’s ability to know if whether or not it was interacting with a machine.
The rods are the rules programmed into a computer. If a machine is given learning abilities, rules ensure that a machine is not going to learn something it shouldn’t. Isaac Asimov wrote three rules for robotics:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The Rods are the rules, and rules were made to be broken. So let’s think about why rules are broken. Rules are broken in pursuit of an outcome.
Cash Prize
Rules are broken in pursuit of an outcome. The outcomes on a Plinko board are set cash prizes. If a player breaks the rules, the outcomes are pre-defined and contained, even if rules are broken. If a player cheats, the game will continue. Checks and balances can remove bad players to keep the game intact. The majority of Plinko players do not break the rules.
As makers pursue artificial intelligence, and machines are given the ability to learn, controlling the outcomes with checks and balances will be the key sustaining the game.
Chips
Chips are the requests made by players. Without throwing a chip down the board, players don’t get the outcomes they’re looking for. A Plinko player doesn’t throw a chip, and expect to buy a vowel on Wheel of Fortune. That’s a different a game, on a different board, at a different time slot. A player can jump to different boards, but they won’t have access to the same chips from the previous board.
Makers control the type of chips (data), players (users) can throw (request) on their boards (apps/gadgets).
While we pursue artificial intelligence capable of machine learning, building products that follow the rules of robotics, and come with checks-and-balances will keep humanity as the ruling species on this planet until Aliens, the Devil, Zod, YouTube Ads you can’t skip, the flying Spagetti Monster, whoever comes to threaten it.
Player
Makers can control the board, rods, chips, and cash prizes. They can’t control the player (hate the player, not the game). It’s Bob Barker’s job to keep The Price is Right a family, wholesome game.
If the maker fails, so does the game.
A player who breaks rules to produce undesirable outcomes is inevitable. Having a mechanism in artificial intelligence to deal with rule breakers, will keep the game secure. See how Bob Barker deals with this rule breaker to keep his game in tact:
Will Artificial Intelligence have consciousness?
Theoretically, yes. If the robots of the future are capable of thinking, learning, making decisions… consciousness would become a philosophical debate. What worries people is what A.I. would do with that new found consciousness. What’s stop robots from doing this?
The only thing stopping them from doing this, is purpose. A machine without proper rods or undetermined cash prizes can be hazardous to humans. A machine whose rules of robotics have not been compromised won’t have the capacity to pose any threat to human kind.
The future of artificial intelligence is governed by design.
Smartware Labs is working on an A.I… Stay tuned for Part 2.
