Newborn AIs

“It blows my mind!” — says Elon Musk now and convinces that everybody will say so sooner than we can think about it.

What he probably is talking about, is a level 4 of autonomous driving in Tesla cars he created. The level, when the system is so powerful, that it enables cars to drive on their own under any conditions, even in high traffic urban environment. Cars at level 4 have to react appropriately in emergency situations as well. And the word ‘appropriately’ is a key. Designing such reactions generates a lot of moral dilemmas.
Now, Tesla cars are somewhere between levels 2 and 3. They still cannot detect pedestrians and can keep lanes only on highways. But even then drivers should be fully focused to avoid collisions. First tragic accident happened recently.

Tesla’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be not one of the most advanced and universal. But definitely is among ones most tangible in everyday life. Always focused. Immune to alcohol and drugs. Continuously learning. Limited only by electric power. Such is artificial intelligence. And that foreshadows an end to the tragic traffic collisions, which mostly are a result of humans faults and shortcomings.

Driving cars isn’t the only area where we made errors. It would be easier to mention areas that we are almost perfect at. But as Tesla proves, it’s one of many fields where we can fast and easily use AIs and Machine Learning (ML) for help.

Two recent news show that also eHealth may benefit from the development of AI. First: the success of “Watson”. IBM’s AI determined proper leukemia form in a woman. Several doctors were helpless at this task. Traditional methods of diagnosis failed, so specialists fed Watson with 20 million oncological studies. AI than compared them with woman’s genetic data and found the correct leukemia form.

Second news: your.md start-up, which created mobile application offering automated symptoms diagnosis. This app is now the leader among similar solutions in over 40 countries. It bases its knowledge on resources of British National Health Service. It stores information about over 1000 illnesses and symptoms. Such database enables the app to advise you about your ailments. App tells you whether you should take pills, contact the doctor or call an ambulance. All without humans supervision.

Another area that is starting to be taken over by Artificial Intelligence is cyber security. Last week Las Vegas Paris Hotel hosted a contest for bots. AIs competed with each other in fixing and exploiting bugs in rivals machines. The game lasted for several hours and brought some surprises. A bug, thought to be possible to be exploited only by human, was used by a bot.

Most of these revelations about AI astounds us. They happen unexpectedly and surprisingly fast, even for experts. Google Alpha AI won Go match against human master 10 years before the date designated by futurologists! But most of such systems are still at newborns phase and excel only at narrow tasks. We jump from excitement when they start saying words. But we quickly remind that they still cannot even walk. When will AIs turn 18?