AI can do lots, but there are limits
My Impression of AI
I had read an article(published in a magazine) during my secondary school time. Unfortunately I cannot recall the title. The story background was about a future city where human and robots were living together in harmony. The robots looked so similar and were capable of doing things just like the humans. Both collaborated in various industries, including politics, education, transportation, etc. The only way you could find out if they were a robot or human was to open up the skull to see whether it housed a circuit board or a human brain. Imagine how strong and perfect AI was perceived in such a community in that city.
Not the Terminator-AI yet
I believe this is a common misunderstanding on AI, i.e. people often anticipate AI can work like magic, or it is something so advanced like that is often portrayed in the blockbuster movies. If you build a robot, people tend to imagine that it looks and acts like The Terminator type, i.e. a highly intelligent machine that looks like and acts like a human-being.
In fact, AI today, generally known as a third wave breakthrough is mainly achieved through a deep learning algorithm. This is applied widely on machine vision and audio. And, I must mention that, this is a fully supervised learning result.
Not a mixed Conversational-AI yet
Some countries in this region like Malaysia or Singapore are so unique of their rojak(mixed) culture which results in their truly localised language speaking environment. I have seen how good a conversational AI device, e.g. Alexa, Google Home can handle English conversation; yet we need a true rojak AI to appear in our space.
Apparently, in my view, a teacher’s job is still quite secure, given that not everything fits nicely into a basic straightforward model. In view of this multilingual teachers cannot be easily replaced by AI in this country. By the way, I remember that probably three years ago there was a mini robot called Robi that claimed it was designed to interact in English, Malay and Mandarin. It would be really helpful to share your experience of interacting with Robi.
Not a Creator-AI yet
Human emotions included in a machine have always been controversial. You might argue that reinforcement learning could enable a machine to have a self-consciousness capability. Well, there is no denying that AI has enabled a machine to simulate human’s thinking and behaviour. However, in my own personal opinion, this is still very far away from being on a par with the true actual human emotion level.
Given this we could notice a low adoption of AI in creativity industries like artists, software programmers, researchers, scientists, etc. All these jobs require a high consumption of human brain cell activity and quite often the end product designed will be bespoke and created for a single specific purpose if a human was producing it.
Conclusion
Today, the so called intelligence is based on Turing test which aims to solve a problem in a mathematical way.
Is strong AI possible?
Will a computer really think?
Well, in my opinion, we are at the very beginning stages of this journey. There is much of the path still to tread before we can be absolutely certain what is possible. Let’s focus and appreciate what benefits AI can bring humans at each breakthrough stage. This will enable us to strive for the best solutions for the global world.
