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You may not have noticed, but artificial intelligence, otherwise known as AI, has been sending its all-knowing tendrils slowly but surely onto the World Wide Web. Many of the largest tech companies are arduously working to be the first to perfect this technology so they can corner the market. The big players include Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon. Google has been in the headlines a lot recently. At first, its foray online was tenuous at best and comical at worst when Google created an AI that it turned loose to try to make sense of the images it encountered. Hoping to find a workaround for one of the search engine’s biggest lapses, which makes search engine spiders blind to images and videos, the attempt resulted in hilarity when Google’s creation began to morph images as it tried to make sense of queries posed about them.
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For example: When asked to display a picture of a dumbbell, it created a representation of the dumbbell, complete with the arm holding it. (See image at right)
Other than answering Isaac Asimov’s query as to whether Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, what Google may have inadvertently done was to create the world’s first robotic Picasso. What they also did was unleash the clouds cumulous
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Undeterred by the psychedelic tendencies of its creation, Google then went on to unleash its AI on everything from its digital assistant, called Google Now, to search engine tasks, the latter of which has been dubbed RankBrain.
Using what it learned from its foray into image recognition, Google’s latest AI iteration has been tasked with making sense of queries posed to its search engine, particularly long-tailed queries. The best way to understand the purpose of RankBrain is to read this a short paragraph posted on Bloomberg.com:
The system helps Google deal with the 15 percent of queries a day it gets which its systems have never seen before. For example, it’s adept at dealing with ambiguous queries, like, “What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain?” And RankBrain’s usage of AI means it works differently than the other technologies in the search engine.
What makes RankBrain different from traditional search engine algorithms is that it “learns” from
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One of Google’s senior scientists, Greg Corrado, even admitted that in the few months it has been deployed, RankBrain has become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query.
Google’s CEO Sundar Pinchai also admitted, “Machine learning is a core transformative way by which we are rethinking everything we are doing.”
While currently RankBrain is the tail that wags the Google’s dog, there are a number of tech analysts that think AI is going to take on a larger portion of search engine duties for the world’s most popular search engine. There are also several who think this might not be a good thing.
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In a blog post by thesempost.com entitled, “Google’s RankBrain – 9 Industry Experts Weigh In,” Jack Clark commented that, “RankBrain cannot learn on its own yet. It needs to be retrained
Now I don’t know about you, but I feel more than slightly uneasy about giving up control of the Internet to a thinking machine. Especially when the Internet is wired into nearly everything that humans do on a day to day basis. Now some people would say that I am taking this view to the extreme. I mean, RankBrain is only a tool being employed on one search engine, albeit it a search engine that dominates search. Taking the alarmist view of “Today the Internet, tomorrow the world” is going a bit too far, right? Not if you ask several public figures, such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk their thoughts.
Prof Stephen Hawking, one of Britain's pre-eminent scientists, has said that efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence. He told the BBC: "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." His warning came in response to a question about a revamp of the technology he uses to communicate, which involves a basic form of AI.
Billionaire Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX put it more bluntly, when he expressed the opinion that, “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.” He also admitted that he “invests in companies working on artificial intelligence, just to be able to keep an eye on the technology".
This philosophy is hardly what one could call paranoid, since a number of other major players, including Facebook and Microsoft are also investing heavily in AI.
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Facebook’s director of research, Professor Yann LeCun, one of the most prominent figures in Deep Learning research, stated in September that, “One of the dreams we have had for years is some sort of intelligent agent that seems clever enough to do a lot of tasks, including organizing meetings with friends and accessing information that might take you an hour or two on Google.”
To assist in those aims, Facebook recently launched a virtual assistant called “M”, which is an obvious response to Apple’s Siri, Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana. The difference with M is that it was created with
“What we are hoping to do is take this digital assistant idea to the next level. If you think about Siri, Cortana, Google Now – most of the answers they provide are scripted. Someone has imagined the possible answers and figured out a tree of possibilities. If you go outside of the script, the machine responds with a joke or tries to get out of it. All of its behavior is programmed by humans, but what we are trying to do with M is test
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To those ends, Facebook has been spending time and money acquiring talent and AI firms in their quest to enhance machine intelligence. In 2014, they spend $40 million to acquire Vicarious FPC, an artificial intelligence firm whose avowed goal is to “replicate the neocortex
Can Microsoft Reinvent Itself Via AI?
Not to be outdone and vying to climb back to the top of the tech pyramid, Microsoft has also been pushing
Yoram Yaacovi, who heads up Microsoft’s research and development center in Israel, said in a Wall Street Journal interview in 2014 that, “User interface started with the command prompt, moved to graphics, then touch, and then gestures. It’s now moving to invisible UI, where there is nothing to operate. The tech around you understands you and what you want to do” — and that’s what people expect, he said. “We’re putting this at the forefront of our efforts".
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The last statement begs to ask, “What if your device understands the request, but fails to comply? In the sci-fi classic, 2001 a Space Odyssey, HAL, the artificial intelligence that controlled the spaceship Discovery decided that the best way to complete its mission was to kill the human crew that manned it. Mirroring that sentiment, Elon Musk recently quipped on stage that a future AI system tasked with eliminating spam might decide the best way to accomplish that aim was to eliminate humans.
Whether this is just a case of life imitating art, or whether it’s something we need to take a hard look at, the bottom line is that AI will soon worm its way into every Internet-enabled device on the planet. Since everything from appliances we have in our homes and offices to the vehicles we drive, or are driven or flown by are connected to the World Wide Web, only time will tell if having a “brain in the box” is a good thing or a bad thing.
All I know is that I have enough trouble trying to keep my smartphone from rewriting every text I post. What really causes me to lose sleep at night is worrying about how long it’s going to be before I’m forced to say, “Open the garage door, Hal.”
In this article I discuss how the development of AI (artificial intelligence) is creeping into all aspects of the web and global communications. This article further provides details on how the largest tech companies including Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon are all in a race to corner the AI market. It also discusses how little regard is being given to the idea that AI could pose a threat to mankind.
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If you found this article useful please share it with your friends, family and co-workers. If you would like to learn more about this subject, visit the notes page on this blog for the BlogTalkRadio show dated 12/15/15. I recommend checking out "Has the Internet Made Us Smarter?“, “When Will Computers Out Think You?”, “Is Google Watching You?” and “The Robots Are Coming - Are You Ready?”. You can also search for other related articles by typing in “artificial intelligence” in the search box top of this blog.
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Carl Weiss is president of WorkingtheWebtoWin.com a digital marketing agency in Jacksonville, Florida that routinely works with bloggers and other online marketers to grow their businesses.
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