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Bethany Morgan

Professor Campbell

UWRT 1104

11/9/17

Can Artificial Intelligence Become Less Artificial?

` Artificial Intelligence began as an antiquity, with myths and rumors of an ancient wish

to forge the gods. Dating back to Greek mythology, the ancient idea of artificial intelligence

incorporated the idea of intelligent robots, the best of which could think and feel like men

(Atsma). Talos is one of the earliest examples, being a large man made out of bronze by

Hephaestus, god of the forge. Somewhat realistic humanoid automatons were attempted by

several civilizations throughout history, the oldest known ones being from ancient Egypt and

Greece. They were most often large metal statues of animals or humans, some of them even

made of precious metals to show wealth. Leonardo Da Vinci sketched a robot in the 1400s that

could, if built correctly, move its arms, twist its head, and sit up on its own. The earliest that a

modernrobot was seen was in 1939, when a robot named Elektro was presented at the Worlds

Fair. Elektro could deliver wisecracks in response to voice commands, as well as move its head

and arms, and even smoke cigarettes. However, the more current idea of Artificial Intelligence

began at a workshop that was held on the campus of Dartmouth College during 1956. This

workshop lasted about seven weeks, and is said to essentially have been an extended

brainstorming session. Those who attended the workshop would go on to become some of the

leading researchers in the field for decades. One of those attendees was John McCarthy, at the
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time he was an assistant mathematics professor at Dartmouth, who first coined the term

Artificial Intelligence. McCarthy proposed the idea to the Rockefeller Foundation, to request

funding for the summer workshop, and in the proposal gave a tentative description of AI. The

proposal states:

The study is to proceed on the basis that every aspect of learning, or any other feature

of intelligence, can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to

simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language solve

kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a

significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected

group of scientists work on it together for a summer.

A simple, modern definition of Artificial Intelligence is the theory and development of computer

systems that are able to perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence, such as

visual perception, speech recognition and decision-making.

The topic of Artificial Intelligence itself is a very broad subject, however, my writing will

be more specifically on the technology, new and old, behind AI, and current research and

projects that are involved in modern AI.

Artificial intelligence is already proving its worth. Though it may be rather expensive to

create, the pros may soon outweigh the cons. Artificial intelligence robots will be able to work in

dangerous environments, and take away any risk of human life. AI can also translate far more

languages than the average human, broadening its communication limitations beyond the usual.

A large use for AI at the moment is medical diagnosis. In order for human doctors to be on top of
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medical knowledge, they must spend over 160 hours a week reading on new research papers.

New AI technology can do it at a fraction of the time (Zarkadakis).

Ryan Bort, a staff writer for newsweek, states that the AI takeover is going to happen

much sooner than any of us expect. Yale University and the University of Oxford conducted a

survey of 352 published AI researchers, on their beliefs about progression in AI. The survey

states that researchers believe that there is a 50% chance that AI will outperform humans in all

fields in 45 years, maybe even less. AI is believed to be able to drive a truck by 2027, write a

bestselling book by 2049, and work as a standalone surgeon by 2053 (Grace).

A new trend in therapy and counseling is using robots as therapists. Let me introduce you

to Woebot, which was created by Alison Darcy, CEO and a Stanford psychologist. Woebot uses

brief daily chat conversations, curated videos, word games, and mood tracking to help people

manage their mental health (Molteni). In a controlled study, a group of 70 undergraduate and

graduate students were asked to engage with either Woebot or a self-help book over a period of

two weeks. The students who engaged with Woebot reported back with significantly higher

reduction levels in their depression and anxiety than the students who engaged with the self-help

book (Woebot). While this program can be very helpful for possible short term daily fixes,

therapy and counseling is a long process that is usually done by a human who can understand,

and empathize with whatever the problem might be. Reading emotions and understanding them

are two different things, and if robots cant experience emotions, can they really understand

them? With this fast-paced technology growth, we might become too quick to ascribe robots

properties they dont have, like the ability to interpret and relate to a large variety of human

emotions.
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In October 2017, Saudi Arabia became the first country to grant official citizenship to a

non human woman. She is a robot named Sophia, and she is basically an emotionally expressive,

or 4 robot that has the capacity to learn. According to her manufacturer David Hanson, she is

mainly composed of artificial intelligence, visual data processing and facial recognition.

According to her website, sophiabot.com, every interaction she has with people has an impact on

how she learns and develops, much like a real human. Upon meeting people, she typically begins

to mimic their facial expressions and attempts to read their emotions based on their reactions.

She states, please be nice to me, as I would like to be a smart, compassionate robot. Currently,

Sophia is placed on wheels and has to be moved around by someone. However, Ben Goertzel,

CEO of SingularityNET, the company that designed her brain, says that she will soon have legs

and arms, and will be able to move and walk around at her will.

IBM is a large business machine corporation, and has positioned their entire future on

their version of an AI machine named Watson. Watson is a computer system that is capable of

answering unusual questions posed in natural language, and is named after IBMs first CEO,

industrialist Thomas J. Watson. IBM built Watson to apply advanced natural language

processing, knowledge representation, automated reasoning and machine learning technologies.

For example, Watson has become a tour guide, can recognize images, interpret emotion in

literature, and even order supplies for you from staples (Vorhies). Watson was built with a

system that includes 2,880 POWER7 processor threads and 15 terabytes of RAM, and uses

IBMs DeepQA software. John Rennie, a previous editor in chief of Scientific American

magazine, says that Watson can process 500 gigabytes per second, which is the equivalent of a

million books. In February of 2013, IBM announced that the first commercial application of
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Watson software system would be for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment

at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York City. Watsons former business chief,

Manoj Saxena, said that 90% of the nurses who used it completely followed its guidance.

Through researching the basics and history of artificial intelligence, I realized just how

complicated one of these pieces of machinery can be. One of the most interesting technologies

behind this artificial mind is called Fuzzy Logic Systems, and that is basically a method of

reasoning for a machine that closely resembles human reasoning. Rather than giving a

straightforward yes or no answer to a question, a machine can go through a way of decision

making that includes all intermediate possibilities. Lotfi Zadeh, the inventor of fuzzy logic,

observed that the human decision making process includes a range of possibilities between yes

and no, such as:

CERTAINLY YES

POSSIBLY YES

CANNOT SAY

POSSIBLY NO

CERTAINLY NO

Zadeh states that some advantages of fuzzy logic is that it is useful for commercial and practical

purposes it can control machines and consumer products, can give acceptable reasoning, and can

help to deal with uncertainty in engineering.

Another big component behind the mind of artificial intelligence is something called

expert systems. These expert systems are computer programs developed to solve complex

problems at a level of extra-ordinary human capacity. Expert systems are capable of advising,

instructing and assisting humans in decision making, demonstrating, explaining, predicting an

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outcome, justifying an outcome and suggesting alternative solutions to problems. They are not,

however, capable of substituting human decision makers, possessing human capabilities and

refining their own knowledge as they gain new perspectives and experiences. The components of

expert systems include knowledge base, inference engine, and user interface. However, expert

systems do have limitations. They can be difficult to maintain, and are quite expensive to

produce.

One of the biggest hurdles for computers is the fact that they can't retain new knowledge

on their own. What makes AI special is the fact that is is beginning to be able to learn, thanks to

multiple machine learning platforms. The goal of these platforms is to develop techniques that

allow computers to learn. Right now, machine learning platforms are being tested mainly in

prediction or classification, with big companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft

implementing them. In order to shape and assemble the predictions it makes, it identifies

successful patterns and learns from them, so as to mimic them later on. Similar to the machine

learning platforms, Deep Learning Platforms are also being developed. This technology uses

several artificial neural circuits, in various layers, made to mimic the human brain. Using the

patterns that the computer can recognize, this brain-like platform can be used for decision

making (Maynez.)

In his book, Artificial Intelligence, The Very Idea, John Haugeland covers a central theme

of the idea that human thinking and rationalizing, and machine computing, are radically the

same. In the chapter titled Real People, Haugeland has an entire section about feelings, and

comparing humans to robots, considering the ability to experience emotion. He states by

common prejudice, robots have no feelings. Rational they may be, but coldly so; logical,
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efficient, insensitive. He then questions whether this is a blessing or a curse, whether machines

are spared the aggravating disruptions of mood and emotion, or if they have to forfeit all that

makes life worth living. This way of looking at the concept of emotionally capable machines is

based off of the assumption that thought and feeling are two separate things. One way that

Haugeland looks at intelligent machines is in a way similar to the way we look at animals.

Creature Feature is a popular theme in science fiction, which includes robots that are basically

like natural animals except for being man made. We know that animals have emotions, and most

have the mental capacity to act rationally, but yet are still not on the same intellectual level as

humans.

Haugeland also introduces the Symbol Manipulation Theory, which states that

intelligence depends only on a systems organization and functioning as a symbol

manipulator--which could really be applied to both humans and machines. He earlier states that

the human mind works through the manipulation of symbols, much like a computer. If that is

true, then the only things that truly separate a human and a computer are the extent to which they

can manipulate said symbols, and/or in what way they manipulate them, such as manipulating

them in such an order that creates feelings or emotion. Computers may have evolved to

understand emotion, but what they lack is our ability for general reasoning. However, with this

fast paced research, they may soon be emotionally equivalent to humans, feeling and interpreting

emotions the same as us.

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Works Cited

Atsma, Aaron. AUTOMOTONES. - Animate Statues of Greek

Mythology, Theoi Project, www.theoi.com/Ther/Automotones.html. Accessed

November 15, 2017.

Bort, Ryan. So, Workers, Experts Say Artificial Intelligence Will Take All of Our Jobs by

2060. Newsweek, 5 June 2017,

www.newsweek.com/artificial-intelligence-will-take-our-jobs-2060-618259. Accessed .

December 01, 2017.

Commemorating the 1956 Founding at Dartmouth College of AI as a

Research Discipline. DARPA. AI@50, July 13-15, 2006. Web. Accessed November 06,

2017.

Grace, Katja, et al. When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI

Experts. Cornell University, 30 May 2017, arxiv.org/abs/1705.08807. Accessed

December 01, 2017.

Haugeland, John. Artificial Intelligence, The Very Idea. MIT-Press, Cambridge,

Massachusetts

1996. Print.

IBM Watson Supercomputer. WhatIs.com, TechTarget, June 2016,

whatis.techtarget.com/definition/IBM-Watson-supercomputer. Accessed November 02,

2017.

Maynez, Natalia. 10 AI Technologies That'll Rule 2017. ADEXT Inc.,

blog.adext.com/en/artificial-intelligence-technologies-2017. Accessed 01 December,

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2017.

Molteni, Megan. The Chatbot Therapist Will See You Now. Wired, Conde Nast, 8 June 2017,

www.wired.com/2017/06/facebook-messenger-woebot-chatbot-therapist/. Accessed

October 02, 2017.

Smithmier, Don. Sophia- the Latest Robot from Hanson Robotics. Hanson Robotics, 2017.

Web. Accessed November 01, 2017.

Vorhies, William. What Can Modern Watson Do? Data Science Central, 15 Nov. 2016,

www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/what-can-modern-watson-do.

Woebot Launches As World's First Chatbot Clinically Proven to Improve Mental

Health.Marketwire, 2017 Nasdaq Inc., 06 June 2017,

www.marketwired.com/press-release/woebot-launches-as-worlds-first-chatbot-clinically-

Proven-to-improve-mental-health-2220439.htm. Accessed 29 November, 2017.

Yunus, Shirjeel. Artificial Intelligence Tutorial. Tutorials Point, Tutorials point August 15,

2017. www.tutorialspoint.com. Web. Accessed October 02, 2017.

Zarkadakis, George. 5 Things AI Can Do Better Than Humans. The Huffington Post,

TheHuffingtonPost.com, 4 Jan. 2016,

www.huffingtonpost.com/george-zarkadakis/5-things-ai-can-do-better_b_8906570.html.

Accessed 30 November, 2017.