The I in AI

We stand today at the verge of a major crossroad in the history of mankind and computers. Until today, it was assumed that computers were what we want it to be, it will obey what we teach it to do, it will carry out the will of its master as would a pedestrian slave. But times are changing and so are my thoughts. We are not far away from a future where a modern day programmer could have the role of an unprivileged, unemployed person. What if we could make a program which could generate other programs according to its will? A machine self sustaining, self repairing, self optimizing – a machine which could chart out a solution for every possible problem in the same methodical and analytical way that we, humans are used to doing – a machine which could think.

For starters let us assume an ordinary day in the life of a human being, say some fifty years from now. Morning begins with an alarm, but with a difference. The alarm understands, it sympathizes with you. It realizes that it is cold outside, and you could very well do with an extended sleep. After a while, a fleshy touch gently shakes your shoulder and whispers in your ears that it is time for you to get up. You wake up to find the cup of coffee already placed at your bedside.

Work is no problem, it is a simple matter of feeding the requirements of the job to the machine and the machine devises a logical set of solutions to the problem. When you interrupt and say that a certain task for which the solution is done could have been interpreted in a better manner, it logically reasons and works with you to find the best possible alternative. It admits when it is wrong and says that it is human to make mistakes. You get startled at this statement, but then realize, it is human after all. It learns, rationalizes, infers and predicts. The machine of the future churned out from the assembly line is going to be a child who has been taught the raw details of interaction and science. But the pathways embedded in birth are not absolute; it alters with training and experience. Yes, I am talking about Artificial Intelligence in its absolute form – a humanoid.

When we face a critical problem in the machine of today, the only possible solution is to manually decipher the cause of the problem and eradicate it. Wouldn’t it have been better had the machine itself dealt with its internal and runtime anomalies and self adjusted in a repair phase keeping transparent to the operator, the truth of its state. This would, in effect produce a self sustaining machine which I was talking of earlier.

All this is like a dream as we still reside in the infancy of Artificial Intelligence. But with breakthroughs in Natural Language Processing and spirited research in distributed computing, we are slowly but surely moving forward in realizing our dream. This is not unlike perpetual motion though, where man had to face several obstacles before realizing that it was not possible. AI is the beginning of the future of science and human interactions with their mechanical counterparts. The concept of such an absolute machine as I mentioned is the manifestation of all the good things AI has to offer, and it will be just the beginning of a brave new world.