Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a new technical science that studies and develops theories, methods, techniques, and application systems for simulating, extending, and expanding human intelligence. Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that attempts to understand the essence of intelligence and produce a new kind of intelligent machine that can respond in a similar way to human intelligence.
Research in this field includes robotics, language recognition, image recognition, Natural language processing, expert systems, etc. Since the birth of artificial intelligence, theory and technology have become more and more mature, and the application field has also continued to expand. It is conceivable that the technological products brought by artificial intelligence in the future will be the container of human intelligence. Artificial intelligence can simulate the information process of human consciousness and thinking. Artificial intelligence is not human intelligence, but it can think like human beings and may surpass human intelligence.
Speaking of the competition between artificial intelligence and human intelligence, it is easy for everyone to think of this. In 2016, the Go artificial intelligence program Alpha Go developed by Deep Mind, a subsidiary of Google, can be described as unlimited scenery. It first easily defeated Lee Sedol, a Korean Go 9-dan player who had been famous for many years and ranked among the top ten in the world's Go rankings, 4:1 in the Wufanqi battle.
Half a year later, he made an appointment with the most recognized and powerful Go players in the world at that time, including Ke Jie, the Chinese genius boy with the highest Go rating in the world, and won 50 games in a row. A game of chess caused by technical problems maintained a complete victory record. For a long time, Go was considered a field where artificial intelligence could not defeat humans. After that, it also declared "fallen".
Faced with AlphaGo's victory, commentators in the scientific community were divided into two camps. One group is the pessimistic group, they believe that artificial intelligence is developing too fast, and even threatens the safety of human beings. Often seen in literary works and sci-fi movies, the Omnic Crisis in which robots dominate human beings and even hackers Empire" is coming.
The other group is the optimist who believes that even if it can beat the strongest Go player in the field of Go, AlphaGo and the supercomputing program it represents are still some distance away from true artificial intelligence. Because compared with its learning, memory, and computing abilities, AlphaGo is still blank in the fields of emotion and thinking. Humans losing Go to AlphaGo is like humans can't beat cars. At least for now, artificial intelligence will not pose too much threat to human existence.
Which point of view is more realistic? It's also hard to say. However, we can sort out the development of artificial intelligence in recent decades and see if we can get a glimpse of it from the historical development process. Humans have been imagining artificial intelligence for a long time. As early as in ancient my country's Liezi Tangwen, it was recorded that a craftsman named Yanshi in the Western Zhou Dynasty created an intelligent robot that could not only speak but also sing and dance; the famous ancient Greek mathematician Hero He also claimed to have made a robot similar to a vending machine, but these are only limited to legends, and it is impossible to verify whether it is true or not.
The first person in history to really put forward the principle of artificial intelligence was the British mathematician Alan Mathison Turing. He comprehensively analyzed the human calculation process and reduced calculation to the simplest, most basic, most Deterministic operational actions, thereby describing basic computing procedures in a simple way. This simple approach is based on the notion of an abstract automaton, with the result that an algorithmically computable function is a function that this automaton can. The connection of automata had a huge impact on later generations, and this automaton was later called Turing machine. Turing also proposed a test method for judging whether a machine is intelligent, which is what we often call the Turing test.
The Turing test refers to the tester and the testee (a person and a machine) separated from the test subject through some devices (such as a keyboard) to ask the testee random questions. After multiple tests, if the machine made the average participant make more than 30 percent false positives, the machine passed the test and was considered to have human intelligence. Through this thought experiment, Turing was able to convincingly explain that thinking machines are possible, and Turing's test became the first serious proposal in artificial intelligence.
The term artificial intelligence really appeared in 1956 (two years after Turing's death). Scholars from various fields such as mathematics, psychology, neurology, computer science, and electrical engineering gathered at Dartmouth College in the United States to discuss how to use computers to simulate human intelligence, and according to computer scientist John McCarthy ( John McCarthy's proposal to formally name this subject area artificial intelligence.
Two cognitive psychologists, Herbert Simon and Alan Newell represented the psychology community at this historic conference, and the "logic theorists" they brought to the conference were the only working artificial intelligence software. Therefore, George McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, the initiators of the Simon, Newell, and Dartmouth conferences, are recognized as the founders of artificial intelligence, also known as the father of artificial intelligence.
McCarthy and Minsky launched the conference with a very ambitious goal: to design a truly intelligent machine with a two-month joint effort of a dozen people. In fact, the years after Dartmouth were indeed a golden age of AI development. Using bulky transistor computers, they have developed a series of magical AI applications: they can solve algebraic problems, prove geometric theorems, and learn and use English... These young researchers communicate in private and publish papers. expressed a rather optimistic mood. In 1970, Marvin Minsky said in a speech: In 3-8 years we will have a machine with average human intelligence.
It was also during this period that ELIZA, the first robot that could chat with people, was invented, and it would talk to users according to the answers set in its own program library. However, unlike the Apple mobile phone software Siri or Microsoft Xiaoice that we will use now, ELIZA doesn't actually know what it is talking about. It just talks to humans according to a preset routine or just repeats the question in a grammatical way.
The research and development of artificial intelligence quickly encountered a bottleneck. On the one hand, the computer hardware could not keep up. On the other hand, scientists discovered that some seemingly simple tasks, such as face recognition or letting a robot control itself to walk around them, it is extremely difficult to realize. They were able to create an AI that could easily solve junior high school geometry problems, but it couldn't control its feet to walk out of a small room. In the famous science fiction movie "Star Wars" series in the 1980s, the images of two intelligent robots more or less reflected what artificial intelligence was in people's minds at that time: funny, loyal, and clumsy.
The two giants of artificial intelligence, McCarthy, and Munster, also have their differences of opinion. The artificial intelligence that Munster wants is an AI that can truly understand human language, understand the meaning of stories, be indistinguishable from the human brain, and even allow robots and humans to make some judgments that are not based on logical algorithms or Let artificial intelligence have sense. Their faction is called the Wizard School. Correspondingly, the other group represented by McCarthy is called the minimalist. They don't want robots to have the same way of thinking as humans, they just want a "machine" that can solve problems according to established procedures.
However, with the rapid advancement of computer technology and the research of human brain neuroscience, another brand-new way of thinking emerged in the 1980s: they believed that in order to obtain true intelligence, a machine must have a body it needs sense, move, survive and interact with the world. During this period, both the United States and Japan filmed a large number of entertainment programs featuring giant robots, the most famous of which, of course, was the Transformers series and The Variety Lion Series which our generation was addicted to when we were young.
However, whether it is Optimus Prime or Megatron, these giant robots from alien planets are at least a little different from the artificial intelligence we have seen: the thinking and emotion in their minds are different from life. Innate, not man-made. Giving a machine real life is not an easy task. However, with the advancement of computer hardware, artificial intelligence has also grown rapidly.
According to Moore's Law (Moore's Law is the experience of Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, its core content is the number of transistors that can be accommodated on an integrated circuit will double approximately every 18 months.), the computer Computing speed and memory capacity double every two years. Any computer today can compute tens of millions of times faster than the computer McCarthy used in the 1950s. In the face of the rapid increase in computing power, many problems that seemed never to be solved before have been solved.
On May 11, 1997, IBM's super artificial intelligence "Deep Blue" defeated the world champion Kasparov in a chess match. This has also become a landmark event in the progress of artificial intelligence, and even people have made up many jokes to exaggerate the horror of artificial intelligence.
The 1999 film "The Matrix" swept the world, more or less reflecting people's "worship and fear" of artificial intelligence. In this film, a young cyber hacker, Neo, discovers that the seemingly normal real world is actually controlled by a computer artificial intelligence system called "Matrix". Immerse in a nutrient solution to become a bio-battery.
However, in the nearly two decades since then, artificial intelligence has never been able to show any hostility to humans-or it may be that we have already been controlled by them. It has been widely recognized over the years that many of the problems to be solved in the study of AI have become research topics in the fields of mathematics, economics, and operations research. The sharing of mathematical language not only allows AI to cooperate with other disciplines at a higher level, but also makes research results easier to evaluate and prove, and AI has become a more rigorous branch of science. However, the topic of "artificial intelligence ruling mankind" has rarely been mentioned except in the science fiction circle.
However, the appearance of the Alpha dog has added a layer of concern to people. This is because its design breaks through the restricted area where the original artificial intelligence chess player will not blur the point selection, and will "think" like a human. So in time, can a real Turing machine really appear? Will this kind of artificial intelligence that can crush humans in IQ really still serve us?
Speaking of which, I have to mention Isaac Asimov, a scientist who works part-time as a popular science writer. It was he who proposed the famous "Three Laws of Robotics" in his 1950 collection "I, Robot", namely:
First Law: A robot shall not injure a human being, or do nothing while witnessing the danger to a human being.
Second Law: A robot must obey orders given to it by humans, except when such orders conflict with the First Law.
The third law: A robot should protect its own survival as much as possible without violating the first and second laws.
On the surface, these three laws are all nonsense, but if you study carefully, you will find that they are logically interlocked, putting on a rule for artificial intelligence that can protect itself without harming human shackles. Throughout the history of artificial intelligence development, we can draw a definite conclusion: Is it possible for artificial intelligence to surpass humans in the future? Have! Not only there is, but there is great hope, and with the advancement of hardware technology, that day will soon come. So is it necessary to be especially wary of artificial intelligence? unnecessary! Because as long as the three laws of robots are still in place, they will not be able to turn the sky over.