Essay

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Trust and empathy are the key quality factors in conversational avatar communications. While trust is associated with the credibility and data-security of the avatar service provider, empathy relates to the communication skills of an avatar.

An avatar in his role as an artificial human has a distinct personality, possibly virtually copied from a real-life individual. The personality of the avatar must convey sympathy and competence and match the role a human would have in the “real”- world.

The conversational avatar, acting as an artificial human, defines a new scenario of intelligent machine communication, possibly as far reaching as the launch of the internet 25 years ago.

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AI has made rapid progress by leveraging enormous amounts of human expertise and data. However, for some problems this human knowledge may be too unreliable or simply unavailable. As a result, a long-standing ambition of AI is to create algorithms capable of achieving superhuman performance with no human input.

Ever since the mathematician/physicist Sir Roger Penrose published his best-selling book “The Emperor’s New Mind”, there is an intense discussion going on about the effect quantum theory could have for AI. Penrose essentially believes that current day computers and hence AI can never reach the highest levels of human intelligence because human understanding is non-computational and hence exceeds the capabilities of machines.

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Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning in combination with large data-libraries significantly improve the quality and cost generating predictions.

Prediction is one of the possible objectives of mathematical modelling in fields such as healthcare, economics and finance. Decision-making is the process of identifying and choosing alternatives based on the values, preferences and beliefs of the decision-maker.

To get started with AI, the challenge is to identify the key decisions where the outcome is tied to uncertainty. While experts are mostly in agreement about the benefits of AI in healthcare, some doctors and academics are wary we could be headed in the direction of data-driven medical practices too fast.

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Common-sense reasoning (CSR) is a major stepping-stone in reaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Many experts from the AI-community, like Geoffrey Hinton, considered the ‘grandfather’ of neural networks, or Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind agree, that we need new concepts that go beyond Deep Learning and back-propagation.

At a glance, humans can perceive whether a stack of dishes will topple, a branch will support a child’s weight … or if a tool is firmly attached to a table or free to be lifted. Such rapid physical inferences are central to how people interact with the world and with each other, yet their computational underpinnings are poorly understood.

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Asking questions has always played a role in leadership, but it’s more vital than ever in today’s fast-changing digital landscape, says Hal Gregersen, the executive director of the MIT Leadership Center and lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management.

Consequently, the drive to provide business leaders with conversational AI systems to add support to their decision making is gaining momentum.

Microsoft has become a major driving force in conversational AI. Forming the ‘Microsoft AI & Research Group’, bringing together more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers to focus on the companies AI products and services, underlines the intensity of this strategic shift to develop machines that can think, reason and communicate like humans.

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