(3rd-January-2021)
• What is the future of AI? IBM's Watson beat champions of the sophisticated language game Jeopardy.
• April 2014 Google's self-driving car had logged 700,000 miles without any accidents.
• Videos show how Boston Dynamics' walking robot named Atlas is uncannily human-like.
• A computer system by DeepMind has learned to play seven Atari video games, six better than previous computer systems and three better than human experts, with no foreknowledge of the games other than knowing that the goal is to maximize its score.
• Vicarious has developed a system that reliably solves CAPTCHAs, which are intended to distinguish humans from computers. In some tests, computers surpass human skill at face recognition.
• Microsoft has created a system that can recognize thousands of different kinds of objects in images.
• More generally, automation is revolutionizing manufacturing and other industries.
• Furthermore, the system would recognize actions involving these objects. Such recognitions could be combined into its statistical analysis of language so that, for example, the word chair would be associated with visual images of chairs and with actions involving chairs, such as sitting on chairs and even building chairs.
• The imagined system would require replicating the skill level already achieved in narrow areas (like driving a car) to all common human activities, and would require extending Watson's statistical analysis of text to include the system's sensory and motor experience. While this is a monumental task requiring much greater computing resources than are used by Watson, it is not impossible. People working and conversing with the imagined system would likely believe that it understands human language.
• A group at Google has already demonstrated a system that combines image and text data in a unified statistical analysis, in order to automatically produce captions for images (Vinyals, Toshev, Bengio, and Erhan 2014).
• It is difficult to predict when human-level AI will first be produced. Ray Kurzweil, who has a good track record at technology prediction, estimates this event will occur in 2029 (Kurzweil 2005).
• Google has recently hired Kurzweil, developed its automated car, and purchased DeepMind, Boston Dynamics, Nest Labs, Bot&Dolly, Holomni, Meka Robotics, Redwood Robotics, Industrial Perception, and Schaft Inc. (all developing AI and robotic systems). IBM is applying its Watson technology to medicine. Facebook, Microsoft and several defense contractors are making similar large investments in AI development. All these efforts are accelerating.
Self-driving car and its model of the environment
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