AI Software May Have Just Discovered Aliens and It's Scary🔹Written by Allison Blair
Humans have been trying to discover aliens for a very long time. We have been mostly unsuccessful, though.
I do not like that one bit. Two things in this world freak me out more than anything else: aliens and artificial intelligence. If they start working together? I'm done.
As freaky as this is, it's also really cool. The team, called Breakthrough Listen, tested their AI over in West Virginia by giving it data from a nearby radio telescope. From there, it identified over 20,000 signals that were unique. However, the team still had to look through all 20,000 themselves, and ended up with 8 signals that could be a sign alien life.
The desire to have a stronger AI comes from a desire to eliminate the extra work for the experts, who still have to comb through the results. Ideally, an AI would be able to sort through the unique signals itself as well as identify signals that could just be the result of interference.
Luckily, the same team recently organized a study using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. In their study, the goal was to craft a program that could be used to identify signs of extraterrestrial life that's more accurate than that original AI which "found" the aliens in the first place."
The MeerKAT telescope, which is one of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world, picks up on the radio waves that are constantly being emitted from space. This happens without AI, but the Breakthrough Listen team took it one step further. Since the telescope gets thousands of signals, the team created AI software which would sift through them with relative ease.
Do you think Breakthrough Listen's new study with the MeerKAT telescope will be able to find new aliens? Do you want it to?
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Is the Future of AI Safe for Humans? 🔹 Written by Shantanu Singh Verma
Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
In the words of Nick Bostrom, “Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make." In scientific terms, artificial intelligence (AI) is a way of mechanizing human intelligence into software. AI is a technology that enjoys much praise while facing considerable anxiety. On the one hand, the greatest scientific mind of the century, Stephen Hawking, believed that the rise of robots might be disastrous for mankind. On the other, a scientist like Andrew Ng believes AI is the new electricity.
History of Artificial Intelligence
So let us start with the origin of artificial intelligence. According to Adrienne Mayor, a research scholar in the department of classics in the School of Humanities and Sciences, the history of artificial intelligence has its roots in Greek mythology. The myth states that Hephaestus, a Greek god of invention and mythology, was the first inventor of artificial intelligence when he built Talos, a giant bronze man. Talos was commissioned to protect the island of Crete from invaders sent by Zeus, the king of Greek gods. He was deployed to throw boulders at the ship of enemies and would complete three rounds around the island daily.
In the 20th century, the modern world was familiarized with the topic of artificial intelligence. The period between 1940 and 1960 is regarded as the time when the world experienced significant technological development. At the beginning of 1950, John Von Neumann and Alan Turing became the founding fathers of AI when they made a transition from decimal logic (numbers from 0 to 9) to binary logic (numbers 0 and 1). The breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence came when Alan Turing devised his famous Turing Test (However, it does not appear to qualify the norms of AI for many experts), which checks if the machine can think like humans or not.
The structure of the test was as follows:
Interrogator: Are you a machine?
Computer: No.
Interrogator: Then multiply 25146962 by 15963248.
Computer: (Takes a long pause and gives a wrong answer.)
In this game, if the interrogator is unable to distinguish between the human and the machine, then the machine passes the test.
Eliza was the first chatterbox to attempt the Turing Test, and its creator, Eugene Goostman, won the competition, convincing 29% of the judges that Eliza was a human.
The term artificial intelligence was coined by John McCarthy in 1956 during the Dartmouth conference organized by John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, which is considered the foundation of the discipline. It is worth noting this was less a conference and more of a workshop. It was attended by only six people, including McCarthy and Minsky.
Herbert Simon, an economist and sociologist, suggested in 1957 that AI would be able to beat humans in chess in 10 years. However, during that time, AI entered its first winter, and his prediction came true after 30 years. In May 1997, IBM Deep Blue became the first computer to beat a human, the world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Kasparov stated that one of the major causes that weighed against his victory was that he was denied access to the previous games of IBM Deep Blue in contrast to the computer, which might have studied 100 games of him. Kasparov also suggested that he saw deep intelligence and creativity in the second game and suspected chances of human intervention, but it was denied by IBM. Kasparov asked for the computer's log files, but after being denied earlier, the files were published on the internet by IBM.
The operations of the computer were based on a brute force algorithm, where the computer would analyze each move and then evaluate the next possible moves. Although these types of operations were never supported, they remained a symbolic breakthrough in the history of AI. This was the first time humans realized that AI could beat human intelligence. But many experts believed that Deep Blue had, in reality, only managed to treat a very limited perimeter and was far from the complexity of the real game.
Recent AI Development
Since 2010, access to high-volume data and the discovery of high-efficiency processors that accelerate calculating power have bloomed in the field of AI. Amongst the machine learning techniques, the most promising technique is deep learning, which is used for image and voice recognition and has a wide variety of real-world uses.
Is the Future of AI Safe for Humanity?
Many scientists say answering this question requires weighing multiple pros and cons, as well as considering unknown factors. On the beneficial side, artificial intelligence eliminates the necessity for humans to perform tedious tasks. It reduces the chances of error as compared to that of humans. Some uses of artificial intelligence involve using AI robots for risky activities. AI robots are used in crash tests and the mining of coal and oil. AI robots are also deployed in nuclear power plants, which can help to minimize the effects of radiation and control fire during the time of accidents. The development of technologies like Siri by Apple, Cortana by Microsoft, and Google’s OK Google, has made human life much easier. Voice assistance devices can be especially helpful for handicapped persons who want to live independently.
AI can be used in the healthcare sector in the development of new drugs by identifying potential molecules and leveraging a large volume of data. Artificial intelligence software’s been used in disease detection where it is useful in detecting disease-affected areas, helping doctors to be specific about further procedures. Due to its faster decision-making, AI has been used in creating recreational gaming software for humans and for doing hard calculations precisely.
One of the unproven contentions about AI is that it may turn evil in the future. Usually, such articles are accompanied by evil-looking robots to lure people into believing in them. In reality, the major worry of many researchers who believe that AI can be harmful to humans is that its goals will not be aligned with ours. They believe that intelligence enables control and if AI becomes smarter than humans it could be harmful to the human race. There is also concern that humans are getting addicted to artificial intelligence software, which could be harmful to future generations.
Development in the field of artificial intelligence is also leading to the scarcity of employment. Companies are developing technologies that can replace humans in work and most businesses are preferring the use of AI technologies for their work as it increases accuracy and makes computation faster. But some companies understand that while AI automation can replace minimally-qualified individuals, it will take a long time for AI robots to replace humans in high-capacity positions.
Adding to the hysteria, business magnate Elon Musk has also warned that there will be a time when AI robots will take over humans.
Preparing for a Shared Future
The effect of artificial intelligence on the human race depends on us. Should we develop lethal weapons or technology to improve mankind? Do we prefer new jobs replacing old ones or a society where everyone is living a life of leisure and enjoying machine-generated wealth? Do we prefer AI for satisfying personal motives or using it for social good?
Finally, we need to be empowered by AI and not overpowered by it. The future of AI with humans is dependent on how we utilize it. If utilized properly, it could be one of the greatest boons for humanity.
