Essay

Back in 2017 Denis Hassabis of Alphabet’s Deep Mind suggested intensifying the cooperation with Neuroscience to advance AI towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Now, two years later, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have made significant progress both in respect to diversity as well as quality.

Humans have a powerful “physical intelligence” to infer physical properties of objects and predict future states in complex, dynamic scenes. This “abstract system of knowledge” is based on physics (for example forces or masses) and psychology (for example desires or beliefs).

As new computational methods continue to be provided by research, intelligent machines are likely to match humans in learning, possibly within the next ten years.

Read More

To advance AI and Deep-learning further, three issues need to be addressed:
Time:  It can take weeks to train deep-learning networks, engaging high-salaried individuals.
Cost:  Computer time on hundreds of Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) for weeks is expensive.
Data:  In many cases the lack of enough labelled data simply makes it impossible to carry out the project.

To handle the raising complexity to solve these problems requires increased hardware performance.
A three-way race for future AI-applications is on the way, employing the following hardware technologies:

• High-Performance Computing (HPC)
• Neuromorphic Computing (NC)
• Quantum Computing (QC)

Read More

Philosophy can help to provide purpose and guidance by tackling fundamental questions about the meaning of life. Artificial intelligence has close connections with philosophy because both share several concepts such as intelligence, consciousness, epistemology, and even free will.

The idea behind having a CPO is that the position could be helpful in a business environment that is accelerating at an unprecedented speed.

The main-responsibility of a CPO is to provide support for interfacing human values and skills with intelligent machines in order to optimize the potential of man-machine augmentation. To reach this goal he must motivate the team-members to ask questions that are outside of the ‘corporate box’.

Read More

The raising complexity of deep-learning algorithms and networks is beginning to backfire as a lack of transparency generates distrust and concern regarding the ethical implications of possible errors in the results computed.

Next to the regulatory and ethical issues which will continue to be discussed well into 2019 and beyond, we are likely to witness two efforts to restore trust:

Provide secure communication based on quantum-internet to protect private and corporate data with secure access for anyone across the entire globe and to move from a technology-driven AI to a human centric AI, where AI augments humans to reap the potential benefits of AI while adhering to ethical standards as part of the application.

Read More

Progress in language translation provokes the question if it still makes sense to learn a foreign language. Taking this thought a step further, we must raise the question, if our educational institutions are ready of adjusting their learning concepts.

Personalized learning provides the freedom to learn in one’s own time and learning at one’s own pace. Humanity has the unique chance to replace the inefficiency of hierarchical class-room learning with individualized concepts employing AI technology.

Adolescence is the time to foster human values. By combining science and humanities as part of a new educational concept we set the stage to unlock the potential benefits of future AI-applications driven by the three C’s: Curiosity, Consciousness and Creativity.

Read More

Homo sapiens first appeared some 100’000 years ago in Southern Africa. There is evidence that this species was of basically modern intelligence. However, Homo sapiens at that time was crucially lacking in creative imagination.

About 40’000 years ago Creativity ‘burst’ onto the planet as can be observed from remarkable cave paintings or the invention of new stone-tools. There is no consensus among the research community why this happened so suddenly and much remains a mystery.

Following the path of evolution, one can consider AI as a tool invented by humans, which can augment our lives both emotionally as well as logically. However, AI-machines have no intrinsic capability to sustain Creativity without incorporating human values and adherence to the laws of natural sciences.

Read More

Today’s conversational support-services and assistants are voice-activated. Based on natural language processing and speech recognition, these so-called ‘bots’ provide voice and text answers to questions submitted via smart speakers or phones.

However, the future of voice will probably not be relative to speakers alone. The Avatar appears as a screen-based simulation of a fictional Human who is able to sense and monitor the emotions, the physical well-being and the intellectual capacity of its human counterpart.

As Singularity will arrive, a Charta is needed to augment and balance the unique capabilities of Humans and AI-Machines in form of an Ecosystem.

Read More

One of the founding fathers of AI, Marvin Minsky, was once questioned about machine-emotions and said: “The question is not whether intelligent machines can have any emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent without any emotions”.

Augmenting an AI focused on mathematics and statistics with an AI focused on emotion sets the stage of unprecedented power exercised by a few tech conglomerates.

It is the balance between the ever-increasing power of the new potentate – the intelligent machine – and the role of human beings that needs to be defined and regulated.

Read More

For centuries, philosophers and theologians have held the view that civilization, as we know it, depends on a widespread belief in free will. The growing impact of AI in our daily lives adds an additional dimension of concern to this ongoing discussion.

Systems specifically designed to form relationships with a human will have much more power. AI will influence how we think, and how we treat others.

Unfortunately, the commercial forces driving this technology are not always benevolent. Corporations at the forefront of AI drive the value of their shares by increasing traffic, consumption, and addiction to their technology.

Read More

Today, most AI systems are based on layers of mathematics that are only loosely inspired by the way the human brain works. Different types of machine-learning applications require different mathematical structures, and the resulting algorithms are only able to perform very specific tasks such as speech recognition or the identification of objects.

While there are many domains where AI is superior, humans still have an advantage when tasks depend on the flexible use of memory. If we can understand that mechanism, the hope is that we can replicate this process with a new generation of neuroscience-inspired AI systems for rapidly solving novel problems.

Read More